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How to buy Bitcoin and Deposit on Roobet Full Tutorial
Hello! In this thread I will do my very best to explain how to purchase Bitcoin safely and deposit it onto Roobet.com ! If anything is too confusing or you need further instructions feel free to message a mod for help!Be very aware of other users offering to sell you bitcoin or purchase on your behalf.If you are new to Bitcoin in general I strongly recommend watching this quick video on the basics of bitcoin safety https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z2xggmeW1AAfter you have watched that or you already understand bitcoin skip to down below! Buying Bitcoin Step 1 Chosing an exchange Ok so you want to buy bitcoin to play on roobet? No problem! Bitcoin is super easy to use once you understand it! The first thing you need to do is pick an exchange to purchase from. I would recommendcoinbaseas it is a very large and trusted exchange.If coinbase does not work in your region then I would recommendBinance The last option if buying online doesn't work would be a local Bitcoin ATM use google to find one close to you. Step 2 Signing up -coinbase Sign up using https://www.coinbase.com/join/carava_zo to get a bonus 10$ btc on your first purchase Once you create an account you will be prompt to verify both a Email & Phone Number *Sometimes a photo id is required* *(It is recommend to add one as it will improve account security and increase your buying limit)* Follow the on screen prompts until you get to Add Payment Method Add your method of payment Once you link a Bank/Credit Card you will now be in the main page https://preview.redd.it/a58hftutv8d51.png?width=1892&format=png&auto=webp&s=9ce87ba198fdcaad10a2da4725c1030fca4d1741
Copy the Bitcoin Address (Your bitcoin address not the one in the screenshot)
Head back to coinbase
You should still have the Sent/Receive tab open if not open it back up
Put in the amount of BTC you wish to send
I like to add a note to keep my purchases organized this is optional
PASTE THE ROOBET DEPOSIT ADDRESS WE COPIED FROM STEP 1
DOUBLE TRIPLE QUADRUPLE CHECK THE ADDRESS IS CORRECT YOU ONLY GET 1 SHOT AT THIS GO SLOW
If everything looks good click send
TRIPLE CHECK BEFORE CLICKING SEND You will be given a confirmation screen again take note of the fees It is easy to get confused especially with currency conversion its always best to look at the BTC amount not the $ amount. (pro tip) Last chance to check everything Once you confirmed everything click send and the BTC is on its way! Go back to roobet and keep an eye on your notifications. Thanks to Roobet Instant funding you only need 1 confirmation before your funds are ready to go! https://preview.redd.it/14x2wwmo59d51.png?width=524&format=png&auto=webp&s=d40212fd1b67555fecb6e7f69c78d47c1abe569f Thats it!!!!You have successfully purchased and added BTC to your roobet account! Things to note Bitcoin is risky be safe take time to learn it Gambling is risky... Crpto is risky this website combines both please take the appropriate steps to ensure not only your financial safety but also your metal health Play Smart Play Safe Thank you for reading!if this helped you at all I would love it if you used my links above when signing up This was my first reddit guide I apologize if it is messy/confusing I will work on the formatting any Feedback is appreciated -Dom
How to purchase and exchange your litecoin! (longer read)
This post will show you the best ways to buy litecoins using many different payment methods and exchanges for each method. Before you start, make sure you have a good litecoin wallet to store your LTC. NEVER store your litecoins on a crypto exchange.
Popular Exchanges
eToro
Start trading fast; high limits
Easy way for newcomers to get bitcoins
Your capital is at risk.
Coinbase
High liquidity and buying limits
Easy way for newcomers to get bitcoins
“Instant Buy” option available with debit card
Coinmama
Works in almost all countries
Highest limits for buying bitcoins with a credit card
Reliable and trusted broker
Buy Litecoin with Credit Card or Debit Card
Let’s dive into some of the exchanges supporting Litecoin credit card purchases. These exchanges are our favorite ways to buy.
Coinbase
Coinbase is the easiest way to buy litecoins with a credit card. Coinbase is available in the United States, Canada, Europe, UK, Singapore, and Australia. The fees will come out to 3.99% per purchase. Here is a good video that can help walk you through the process of buying on Coinbase, although it’s fairly easy.
Coinmama
Coinmama recently added the ability to buy litecoin directly on the platform. Users from nearly any country in the world can use Coinmama to buy litecoins. Coinmama has some of the highest limits among credit card exchanges.
BitPanda
BitPanda is based in Austria and is a crypto brokerage service. You can buy using a credit card from most European countries.
CEX.io
CEX.io is based in the UK and is one of the oldest crypto exchanges online. CEX.io supports litecoin and its users from nearly anywhere in the world can buy litecoin with credit card on the platform.
Buy Litecoin with Bank Account or Bank Transfer
Coinbase
Coinbase is the easiest way to buy litecoins with a bank account or transfer. Coinbase, like is is for credit cards, is available in the United States, Canada, Europe, UK, Singapore, and Australia. Coinbase is one of primary exchanges used to buy Litecoins. Americans can use ACH transfer (5–7 days wait), and Europeans can use SEPA transfer (1–3 days wait). The fees will come out to 1.49% per purchase.
BitPanda
BitPanda is based in Austria and is a crypto brokerage service. You can buy using SEPA transfer from most European countries. You can also use SOFORT, NETELLER, or GiroPay.
CEX.io
CEX.io also supports litecoin buys via bank account. This is via wire transfer for US citizens, SEPA for Europe, and SWIFT for the rest of the globe.
Binance
Binance is now one of the largest if not the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. It supports bank and card purchases of Litecoin as well as Litecoin trading pairs with Bitcoin and Etehreum.
Get a Litecoin Wallet
Before we move onto other options: Never store your litecoins on an exchange! Always withdrawal your litecoin to an offline cryptocurrency wallet like the Ledger Nano S or any other wallet that you control. The Ledger Nano S and TREZOR are the best options for secure storage.
Other Methods to Buy Litecoin
If you don’t have a card or want to avoid the high fees, you can use the following methods to buy Litecoin as well. Find out which one works best for you.
Buy Litecoin with PayPal
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to buy Litecoin with PayPal. Other sites will tell you that cex allows for this, but that is no longer the case. You can, however, now use eToro to buy Litecoin, unless you live in the United States. If you live in the US, the only way to buy Litecoin with Paypal is to buy Bitcoin using paypal, and then use the Bitcoins to buy Litecoin. You can easily buy Bitcoin using Paypal on Local Bitcoins. Once you have Bitcoin, you can use an exchange like Coinbase Pro to swap the Bitcoin for Litecoin.
Buy Litecoin with Cash
There is no good way to buy litecoins with cash. LocalBitcoins is the most popular way to buy bitcoins with cash, and it does not have Litecoin support. Other popular cash to Bitcoin exchanges like BitQuick and Wall of Coins also do not support LTC. So you will have to first buy bitcoins with cash then exchange them for LTC using the method described below. The same goes for Bitcoin ATMs. Most do not support Litecoin. So if you want to buy litecoins at a Bitcoin ATM you first have to buy bitcoins and then trade the BTC for litecoins.
Buy Litecoin with Bitcoin
If you already have Bitcoins then it is VERY simple to convert some of your BTC to litecoins. You just need to find an exchange with the LTC/BTC pair, which is most exchanges since LTC/BTC is a very popular pair to trade.
Buy Litecoin with Skrill
BitPanda, mentioned above, also accepts Skrill payments for LTC. The fees will vary and are simply included in your buy price.
Cryptmixer
Cryptmixer is probably the fastest way to convert BTC to Litecoin. You just enter the amount of LTC you want to buy, and give them a LTC address. Then they will tell you how much BTC to send to their address. Once your BTC is sent, you will have LTC delivered to your wallet very shortly after.
Buy Litecoin with Ethereum
Ethereum has experienced a massive price rise. Nearly a year ago it was $10, and now at over $500, many want to move some of their ETH gains into other coins like Litecoin. Litecoin has very good liquidity, and is very popular among traders especially in China. So this guide is going to show you how to buy litecoins with Ethereum. We will show some of the best exchanges you can use, and the pros and cons of using different types of exchanges over the other.
Cryptmixer
Cryptmixer is one of the most unique exchanges, and also one of the fastest ways to convert your ETH to LTC. With Cryptmixer you do not even need to store your money with the exchange, meaning you are at very little risk of getting your funds stolen. With Cryptmixer you simply specify the amount of LTC you want to buy, and specific the address to where your litecoins should be sent and within 30 minutes you will have LTC delivered to your wallet.
Poloniex
Poloniex is the world’s largest altcoin exchange. However, there is a huge downside to using Poloniex to convert your ETH to LTC: Poloniex does not have a LTC/ETH market, meaning you have to first trade your ETH to BTC, and then trade your BTC for LTC. While this method works, you will have to make multiple trades and also pay fees twice.
ShapeShift
Shapeshift is basically the same as Cryptmixer, and was actually the first company to come up with the concept of an exchange that does not hold your own funds.
Frequently Asked Questions About Buying Litecoin
Many of you may still have lots of questions about how to buy Litecoin. Odds are we have answered almost any question you could think of below. We will aim to answer many of the most common questions relating to buying Litecoin.
Why are there limited options to buying Litecoin using other altcoins?
The issue in all crypto markets is liquidity. As the space gets bigger, the liquidity also gets better. But as of now, the only VERY liquid cryptocurrency is Bitcoin. So exchanging two altcoins between each other is often harder than if BTC was involved on one side of the trade.
How much is a Litecoin worth?
Like all currencies, the value of Litecoin changes every second. The value of Litecoin also depends on the country you are in and the exchange you are trading on. You can find the most up to date price on Coinbase.
How do I buy Ripple (XRP) with Litecoin?
The best way to buy Ripple using Litecoin is to either use a non KYC exchange like Cryptmixer or start an account on Binance or Coinbase Pro and sell your Litecoin for Ripple. Look for LTC/XRP trading pairs, and make your trade.
How long does Litecoin take to confirm?
Litecoin blocks are added ever 2 and a half minutes. That means you should get one confirmation every two and a half minutes. This can vary if it takes miners longer to discover a block, but the difficulty of the finding a block should change proportionate to the hashing power on the network so that a block gets added approximately every 2.5 minutes. If you are trying to send money to a merchant, they may require more than one confirmation before they send you products. If you are depositing on an exchange, they may also require three or more confirmations before they credit your account.
How many Litoshis make one Litecoin?
one hundred million (100,000,000) Litoshis make one (1) Litecoin.
Where do I store Litecoin?
The best place to store litecoin is on a hardware wallet. You can find the best one for you on our page dedicated to hardware wallets.
When is the Litecoin halving?
The expected date of the next Litecoin block reward halving is August 7th, 2023.
Why can litecoin take so long to buy?
Litecoin can take long to buy because the legacy banking system is very slow. If you are buying with another cryptocurrency, you will see how fast it is to buy! Bank transfer in the USA, for example, take about 5 days to complete. So any purchase of Litecoin made with a US bank transfer will take a minimum of 5 days.
How do I buy Litecoin with Paypal?
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to buy Litcoin with PayPal. Other sites will tell you that cex allows for this, but that is no longer the case. You can, however, now use eToro to buy Litcoineum, unless you live in the United States. If you live in the US, the only way to buy Litcoin with Paypal is to buy Bitcoin using paypal, and then use the Bitcoins to buy Litcoin. You can easily buy Bitcoin using Paypal on Local Bitcoins. Once you have Bitcoin, you can use an exchange like Cryptmixer to swap the Bitcoin for Litcoin.
Can you buy partial litecoins?
Yes, litecoin, like Bitcoin, is divisible to many decimal places so you can buy 0.1 LTC, 0.001 LTC, etc.
Can you sell litecoin?
Yes, you can sell LTC on most of the exchanges mentioned above. The fees, speed, and privacy is the same in most cases.
Can anyone buy litecoins?
Anyone is free to buy litecoins, as long as you find an exchange that supports your country. Most cryptocurrency wallets do not require ID to sign up so you can always make a wallet and get paid in litecoin, too.
Which payment method is best to use?
For speed, credit card will likely be fastest. For larger amounts, bank transfer is best. For privacy, it’s best to buy bitcoins with cash and then trade for litecoins using Cryptmixer or Shapeshift.
Is it better to mine or buy litecoins?
If you have cheap electricity, it might be worth it to mine litecoins. If you have solar power or just want to mine for fun then it could be worth it. Otherwise, it’s probably better just to buy. Mining is constantly changing and small changes in Litecoin price or electricity can greatly affect your profitability.
What should I do with my litecoins once I buy?
You should immediately move your litecoins into a secure wallet. You should never leave your litecoins on an exchange. There have been countless hacks in cryptocurrency since Bitcoin was created in 2009. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost money. So buy your litecoins, and then instantly send them into a wallet you control so you are not at risk of losing money to a hack or scam.
Crypto Banking Wars: Can Non-Custodial Crypto Wallets Ever Replace Banks?
Can they overcome the product limitations of blockchain and deliver the world-class experience that consumers expect? https://reddit.com/link/i8ewbx/video/ojkc6c9a1lg51/player This is the second part ofCrypto Banking Wars— a new series that examines what crypto-native company is most likely to become thebank of the future. Who is best positioned toreach mainstream adoptionin consumer finance? --- While crypto allows the world to get rid of banks, a bank will still very much be necessary for this verypowerfultechnology to reach the masses. As we laid out in our previous series, Crypto-Powered, we believe companies that build with blockchain at their core will have the best shot at winning the broader consumer finance market. We hope it will be us at Genesis Block, but we aren’t the only game in town. So this series explores the entire crypto landscape and tries to answer the question, which crypto company is most likely to become the bank of the future? In our last episode, we offered an in-depth analysis of big crypto exchanges like Coinbase & Binance. Today we’re analyzing non-custodial crypto wallets. These are products where only the user can touch or move funds. Not even the company or developer who built the application can access, control, or stop funds from being moved. These apps allow users to truly become their own bank. We’ve talked a little about this before. This group of companies is nowhere near the same level of threat as the biggest crypto exchanges. However, this group really understands DeFi and the magic it can bring. This class of products is heavily engineer-driven and at the bleeding-edge of DeFi innovation. These products are certainly worth discussing. Okay, let’s dive in.
Users & Audience
These non-custodial crypto wallets are especially popular among the most hardcore blockchain nerds and crypto cypherpunks.
“Not your keys, not your coins.”
This meme is endlessly repeated among longtime crypto hodlers. If you’re not in complete control of your crypto (i.e. using non-custodial wallets), then it’s not really your crypto. There has always been a close connection between libertarianism & cryptocurrency. This type of user wants to be in absolute control of their money and become their own bank. In addition to the experienced crypto geeks, for some people, these products will mean the difference between life and death. Imagine a refugee family that wants to safely protect their years of hard work — their life savings — as they travel across borders. Carrying cash could put their safety or money at risk. A few years ago I spent time in Greece at refugee camps — I know first-hand this is a real use-case. https://preview.redd.it/vigqlmgg1lg51.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=0a5d48a63ce7a637749bbbc03d62c51cc3f75613 Or imagine a family living under an authoritarian regime — afraid that their corrupt or oppressive government will seize their assets (or devalue their savings via hyperinflation). Citizens in these countries cannot risk putting their money in centralized banks or under their mattresses. They must become their own bank. These are the common use-cases and users for non-custodial wallets.
Let’s take a look at some of the strengths with non-custodial products.
Regulatory arbitrage Because these products are “non-custodial”, they are able to avoid the regulatory burdens that centralized, custodial products must deal with (KYC/AML/MTL/etc). This is a strong practical benefit for a bootstrapped startup/buildedeveloper. Though it’s unclear how long this advantage lasts as products reach wider audiences and increased scrutiny.
User Privacy Because of the regulatory arbitrage mentioned above, users do not need to complete onerous KYC requirements. For example, there’s no friction around selfies, government-issued IDs, SSNs, etc. Users can preserve much of their privacy and they don’t need to worry about their sensitive information being hacked, compromised, or leaked.
Absolute control & custody This is really one of the great promises of crypto — users can become their own bank. Users can be in full control of their money. And they don’t need to bury it underground or hide it under a mattress. No dependence, reliance or trust in any third parties. Only the user herself can access and unlock the money.
Weaknesses
Now let’s examine some of the weaknesses.
Knowledge & Education Most non-custodial products do not abstract away any of the blockchain complexity. In fact, they often expose more of it because the most loyal users are crypto geeks. Imagine how an average, non-crypto user feels when she starts seeing words like seed phrases, public & private keys, gas limits, transaction fees, blockchain explorers, hex addresses, and confirmation times. There is a lot for a user to learn and become educated on. That’s friction. The learning curve is very high and will always be a major blocker for adoption. We’ve talked about this in our Spreading Crypto series — to reach the masses, the crypto stuff needs to be in the background.
User Experience It is currently impossible to create a smooth and performant user experience in non-custodial wallets or decentralized applications. Any interaction that requires a blockchain transaction will feel sluggish and slow. We built a messaging app on Ethereum and presented it at DevCon3 in Cancun. The technical constraints of blockchain technology were crushing to the user experience. We simply couldn’t create the real-time, modern messaging experience that users have come to expect from similar apps like Slack or WhatsApp. Until blockchains are closer in speed to web servers (which will be difficult given their decentralized nature), dApps will never be able to create the smooth user experience that the masses expect.
Product Limitations Most non-custodial wallets today are based on Ethereum smart contracts. That means they are severely limited with the assets that they can support (only erc-20 tokens). Unless through synthetic assets (similar to Abra), these wallets cannot support massively popular assets like Bitcoin, XRP, Cardano, Litecoin, EOS, Tezos, Stellar, Cosmos, or countless others. There are exciting projects like tBTC trying to bring Bitcoin to Ethereum — but these experiments are still very, very early. Ethereum-based smart contract wallets are missing a huge part of the crypto-asset universe.
Technical Complexity While developers are able to avoid a lot of regulatory complexity (see Strengths above), they are replacing it with increased technical complexity. Most non-custodial wallets are entirely dependent on smart contract technology which is still very experimental and early in development (see Insurance section of this DeFi use-cases post). Major bugs and major hacks do happen. Even recently, it was discovered that Argent had a “high severity vulnerability.” Fortunately, Argent fixed it and their users didn’t lose funds. The tools, frameworks, and best practices around smart contract technology are all still being established. Things can still easily go wrong, and they do.
Loss of Funds Risk Beyond the technical risks mentioned above, with non-custodial wallets, it’s very easy for users to make mistakes. There is no “Forgot Password.” There is no customer support agent you can ping. There is no company behind it that can make you whole if you make a mistake and lose your money. You are on your own, just as CZ suggests. One wrong move and your money is all gone. If you lose your private key, there is no way to recover your funds. There are some new developments around social recovery, but that’s all still very experimental. This just isn’t the type of customer support experience people are used to. And it’s not a risk that most are willing to take.
Integration with Fiat & Traditional Finance In today’s world, it’s still very hard to use crypto for daily spending (see Payments in our DeFi use-cases post). Hopefully, that will all change someday. In the meantime, if any of these non-custodial products hope to win in the broader consumer finance market, they will undoubtedly need to integrate with the legacy financial world — they need onramps (fiat-to-crypto deposit methods) and offramps (crypto-to-fiat withdraw/spend methods). As much as crypto-fanatics hate hearing it, you can’t expect people to jump headfirst into the new world unless there is a smooth transition, unless there are bridge technologies that help them arrive. This is why these fiat integrations are so important. Examples might be allowing ACH/Wire deposits (eg. via Plaid) or launching a debit card program for spend/withdraw. These fiat integrations are essential if the aim is to become the bank of the future. Doing any of this compliantly will require strong KYC/AML. So to achieve this use-case — integrating with traditional finance —all of the Strengths we mentioned above are nullified. There are no longer regulatory benefits. There are no longer privacy benefits (users need to upload KYC documents, etc). And users are no longer in complete control of their money.
Wrap Up
One of the great powers of crypto is that we no longer depend on banks. Anyone can store their wealth and have absolute control of their money. That’s made possible with these non-custodial wallets. It’s a wonderful thing. I believe that the most knowledgeable and experienced crypto people (including myself) will always be active users of these applications. And as mentioned in this post, there will certainly be circumstances where these apps will be essential & even life-saving.
However, I do not believe this category of product is a major threat to Genesis Block to becoming the bank of the future.
They won’t win in the broader consumer finance market — mostly because I don’t believe that’s their target audience. These applications simply cannot produce the type of product experience that the masses require, want, or expect. The Weaknesses I’ve outlined above are just too overwhelming. The friction for mass-market consumers is just too much. https://preview.redd.it/lp8dzxeh1lg51.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=03acdce545cd032f7e82b6665b001d7a06839557 The winning bank will be focused on solving real user problems and meeting user needs. Not slowed down by rigid idealism like censorship-resistance and absolute decentralization, as it is with most non-custodial wallets. The winning bank will be a world-class product that’s smooth, performant, and accessible. Not sluggish and slow, as it is with most non-custodial wallets. The winning bank will be one where blockchain & crypto is mostly invisible to end-users. Not front-and-center as it is with non-custodial wallets. The winning bank will be one managed and run by professionals who know exactly what they’re doing. Not DIY (Do It Yourself), as it is with non-custodial wallets. So are these non-custodial wallets a threat to Genesis Block in winning the broader consumer finance market, and becoming the bank of the future? No. They are designed for a very different audience. ------ Other Ways to Consume Today's Episode:
Bitcoin mining may be a senseless waste of energy. As bitcoin hits mainstream media, the subject of bitcoin mining bubble regarding to pop.For ten years, the media has enjoyed painting bitcoin as a bubble concerning to pop. They’ve gleefully pronounced the bubble popped and bitcoin dead … over 350 times. However the reality regarding bitcoin is that it keeps coming back back. Why? Charlie Munger called bitcoin “worthless artificial gold.” Others in the media have likened bitcoin to a bubble, a “tulip mania,” and different strong statements Each time bitcoin improves itself (like with Segwit Segregated Witnesses. A protocol implemented by Bitcoin to extend transaction speed. SegWit allows a lot of transactions to be written into a single block on a blockchain. or the Lightning Network), or will increase in value, the media is keen and ready to jump on it, decrying and denouncing it. Therefore what’s the reality behind bitcoin’s price -- is it extremely a bubble? The reality regarding bitcoin is straightforward; it's experiencing the same rise and fall cycles as each new technology and asset catego The web also experienced a bubble. Shares of dotcom firms rose by a thousandpercent on a daily basis. Then it all tumbled down. However we have a tendency to’re still using the web, aren’t we have a tendency to? More than ever, in fact. Stocks conjointly experienced big boom and bust cycles, especially in their early days. We might feel like stocks have been around forever -- and to us they need. However stocks conjointly had a starting, and a rough one too. Once upon a time in 1531, when the first stocks were invented, they saw extraordinary volatility, scams, and no regulation. In fact, before stock exchanges, they were sold at occasional shops -- just like cryptocurrencies were sold on la peer to peer marketplace, before exchanges came online. Even property, viewed by the majority as “the safest investment” experienced a dramatic cycle. Business Insider reported that “Between 2006 and 2014, nearly ten million homeowners in America saw the foreclosure sale of their own homes.” And tens of thousands became homeless as a result of of it. Nevertheless --- we have a tendency to’re still living in homes, aren’t we? The future of bitcoin would possibly be the identical as that of stocks, bonds, assets, and the web. It rises and falls like all the others, and it is currently terribly volatile -- but that’s as a result of it’s young. Stocks have been around for 400 years. Dotcom corporations for forty years. Bitcoin is solely 10 years previous -- and cryptocurrencies, normally, are even younger. But slowly, they will become a part of our daily lives. Rich investors are manipulating costs! Look at this headline from the Independent: “Bitcoin price Crash: 'Manipulative Whales Whale A very wealthy individual capable of creating massive trades. View full glossary ' cause Cryptocurrency Market Meltdown!” It’s sensationalism, pure and straightforward. The article goes on to rant against these therefore-known as “whales” -- individuals who own voluminous dollars of BTC -- as evil-doers who’s solely thought is profit. This type of sensationalism is meant to harm Bitcoin’s future; to scare people faraway from doing research and thinking for themselves. Nonetheless, this statement is somewhat true. Up to eighty five% of Bitcoin’s supply is solely owned by onepercent of wallet addresses. But there’s an important point to be made about these numbers. Most of the prime percentage of wallets is not owned by whales -- but by exchanges Exchange On-line platforms on which people can buy and sell cryptocurrencies. View full glossary . However their result is getting smaller and smaller. A company referred to as Chainalysis -- that makes a speciality of analyzing the Bitcoin blockchain -- found that “the actual threat that all whales pose to the cryptocurrency economy is relatively low. If they sold off their entire holdings, it'd be effectively a $3.9 billion sale at current costs. That’s not even tenpercent of this total market capitalization of Bitcoin.” This is as a result of, as I hinted above, several of those wallets holding such vast sums are the ‘cold wallets ’ (wallets held offline) belonging to major exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, and more. These wallets cannot be used to manipulate the price, diminishing the potential impact of enormous ‘whales’ selling their positions. Bitcoin is simply too slow for use as a currency. The reality regarding Bitcoin is that yes, it's slower than VISA, Mastercard, and alternative centralized electronic payment systems. Paying together with your credit cards takes seconds and the network can handle payments around the globe twenty fouseven. But, though Bitcoin can additionally be used around the world, confirmation of payment takes an average of 10 minutes; during the bitcoin craze recently 2017, confirmation times might take hours. Moreover, VISA on average processes around 2,00zero transactions per second (tps). This means the amount of payments individuals make per second on the network. VISA includes a maximum of twenty four,00zero TPS. Bitcoin, by distinction, has a maximum of ten TPS. This argument has been place forward by several critics over the years and picked up by the media as the doom of bitcoin’s future. However Bitcoin could be a technology that evolves. Now let’s assume regarding Bitcoin’s past for a moment. The coin and its underlying technology -- the blockchain -- are only ten years previous. When the web was ten years old -- the year was 1989. Do you keep in mind the net in 1989? I sure do. payments in exchange for not revealing sensitive info. So, in bound ways that, BTC and cryptocurrencies offer hackers a lot of options. However money continues to be king for every criminality. Though it’s true that hackers and phishers do typically ask for payment in BTC There’s an aphorism: “money talks.” It means that that if you would like to get something done -- the best argument you can build is to place down a stack of money. When Bitcoin rose to fame, the primary headlines focused around Bitcoin being the prime choice for criminality. But Lilita Infante, Special Agent for the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) has some contradictory info regarding this. She was one among a ten-person Cyber Investigative Task Force team whose primary aim was the dark web and crypto-related investigations. This cluster is no little force. They collaborate with the Department of Justice, FBI, and also the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. And she went on the record to talk regarding what share of bitcoin transactions are literally being employed for illegal things; she said that “illegal activity has shrunk to about 10 p.c.” Only tenp.c of all the transactions on the Bitcoin network could be used for illegal things. Which number is falling. The fall in Bitcoin’s use among criminals is due to several factors. The most prominent factor is that Bitcoin is no longer anonymous. Sciencemag wrote a full report on how governments are developing and using techniques to explore the Bitcoin blockchain and notice criminals by tracing their bitcoin payments. Paying with bitcoin isn’t simple. I’ve heard this argument flow into widely throughout the years. I still hear it from my grandpa each vacation dinner. He didn’t see a Bitcoin checkout option at the grocery when he bought the turkey -- therefore it’ll never be used. Perhaps Bitcoin is on its means to being such a store of worth. For 10 years now bitcoin has been ready to be saved and retrieved and exchanged -- and it’s worth has only gone up (bumpy but up). Need to get more cryptocurrencies? Check out our top 5 cryptocurrencies to shop for, whether you’re a beginner or an experienced investor! Bitcoin is difficult to use. Bitcoin, like all new technologies, isn't the most user-friendly. You would like to line up a wallet, bear in mind a seed phrase, and several additional steps. Sending and receiving BTC payments additionally involves steps of copy/pasting long strings of random letters and numbers. It’s powerful, I hear ya. I additionally keep in mind all the steps I needed to require to send emails back when those were new. Insert a CD from AOL into my computer. Install AOL. Unplug my phone line. Plug in my Modem. Wait for it to make all those noises and finally connect. Then set up my AOL email and password. It was quite the method. My grandfather never thought emails would come out and even my mother said folks would perpetually like handwriting letters (and using a physical dictionary for spell check!) and sending through the post. Think about it the approach we tend to assume about gold. Not everyone has gold. It’s also a bit difficult to own. If you wish to own gold for its ‘store of price’ properties, you wish to seek out a specialized look to buy investment gold. You need to store it somewhere, sort of a personal safe or a bank vault, and bear in mind the password. This is somewhat troublesome. https://preview.redd.it/k0x3jqsm8df51.jpg?width=770&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ff7c2f29881c28fb22c9828c497cc1981eea2919 Perhaps Bitcoin’s problem will facilitate it retain its value, just like gold You Might Conjointly Like: The 5 est Bitcoin Sports Betting Sites https://www.cryptoerapro.com/bitcoin-future/
Spreading Crypto: In Search of the Killer Application
This is the second post of ourSpreading Cryptoseries where we take a deep dive into what it’ll take to help this technology reach broader adoption. Mick exploring the state of apps in crypto Our previous post explored the history of protocols and how they only become widely adopted when a compelling application makes them more accessible and easier to use. Crypto will be no different. Blockchain technology today is mostly all low-level protocols. As with the numerous protocols that came before, these new, decentralized protocols need killer applications. So, how’s that going? Where is crypto’s killer application? What’s the state of application development within our industry? Today we’ll try to answer those questions. We’ll also take a close look at decentralized applications — as that’s where a lot of the developer energy and focus currently is. Let’s dive in.
Popular Crypto Applications
The most popular crypto applications today are exchanges like Coinbase and Binance — each with tens of millions of users. Other popular crypto exchanges include Kraken, Bitstamp, Gemini, and Bitfinex. In recent years, new derivatives platforms have emerged like FTX and Deribit. The most popular crypto applications today are primarily focused on trading, speculation, and finance. This class of applications dwarfs all other types of applications in terms of users and growth. That’s either a sign of strong product/market fit, or we just haven’t yet discovered other good use-cases. Or a mix of both. https://preview.redd.it/8rnxghfrdh551.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=b3df8c3d87410f6b84432df79528ee4324daf04d
Beyond the fact that the most popular crypto applications are all used for speculation, another common thread is that they are all centralized.
A centralized application means that ultimate power and control rests with a centralized party (the company who built it). For example, if Coinbase or Binance wants to block you from withdrawing your funds for whatever reason (maybe for suspicious activity or fraud), they can do that. They have control of their servers so they have control of your funds. Most popular applications that we all use daily are centralized (Netflix, Facebook, Youtube, etc). That’s the standard for modern, world-class applications today.
Decentralized Applications
Even though the most popular crypto applications are all centralized, most of the developer energy and focus in our industry is with decentralized applications (dApps) and non-custodial products. These are products where only the user can touch or move funds. Not even the company or developer who built the application can access or control or stop funds from being moved. Only the user has control.
These applications allow users to truly become their own bank and have absolute control of their money.
If the most popular applications tend to be centralized (inside and out of crypto), why is so much of our community focused on building decentralized applications (dApps)? For the casual observer, that’s a reasonable, valid question.
“Not your keys, not your coins.”
This meme is endlessly repeated among longtime crypto hodlers. If you’re not in complete control of your crypto (i.e. using non-custodial wallets or dApps), then it’s not really your crypto. Engrained in the early culture of Bitcoin has always been a strong distrust for centralized authority and power — including the too-big-to-fail government-backed financial system. In the midst of the Financial Crisis, Satoshi Nakamoto included this headline in Bitcoin’s genesis block: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” There has always been a close connection between libertarianism & cryptocurrency. So it’s no surprise that much of the crypto developer community is spending their time building applications that are non-custodial or decentralized. It’s part of the DNA, the soul, the essence of our community. https://preview.redd.it/fy33zhkvdh551.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=386c741f13e9119ecfcfffe1c781d09ce58704ed
Personal Experience
When I was at Mainframe, we built Mainframe OS — a platform that developers use to build and launch decentralized applications (dApps). I’m deeply familiar with what’s possible and what’s not in the world of dApps. I have the battle scars and gray hair to prove it. We’ve hosted panels around the various challenges. We’ve even produced videos poking fun at how complicated it is for end-users to interact with.
After having spent three years in the trenches of this non-custodial world, I no longer believe that decentralized applications are capable of bringing crypto to the masses.
While I totally understand and appreciate the ethos of self-sovereignty, independence, and liberty… I think it’s a terrible mistake that as a community we are spending most of our time in this area of application development. Decentralized applications will not take crypto to the masses. Mainframe OS
Overwhelming Friction
The user friction that comes with decentralized applications is just too overwhelming. Let’s go through a few of the bigger points:
Knowledge & Education: Most non-custodial products do not abstract away any of the blockchain complexity. In fact, they often expose more of it because the most loyal users are crypto nerds. Imagine how a normie n00b feels when she starts seeing words like seed phrases, public & private keys, gas limits, transaction fees, blockchain explorers, hex addresses, and confirmation times. There is a lot for a user to learn and become educated on. That’s friction. The learning curve on this is just too damn high.
User Experience: It is currently impossible to create a smooth and performant user experience in non-custodial wallets or decentralized applications. Any interaction that requires a blockchain transaction will feel sluggish and slow. We built a messaging app on Ethereum and presented it at DevCon3 in Cancun. The technical constraints of blockchain technology were crushing to the user experience. We simply couldn’t create the real-time, modern messaging experience that users have come to expect from similar apps like Slack or WhatsApp. Until blockchains are closer in speed to web servers (which will be difficult given their decentralized nature), dApps will never be able to create the smooth user experience that the masses expect.
Loss of Funds Risk: There is no “Forgot Password” functionality when storing your own crypto in a non-custodial wallet. There is no customer support agent you can ping. There is no company behind it that can make you whole if you make a mistake and lose your money. You are on your own. One wrong move and your money is all gone. If you lose your private key, there is no way to recover your funds. This just isn’t the type of customer support experience people want or are used to.
Decentralized applications will always have a place in the market — especially among the most hardcore crypto people and parts of the world where these tools are essential. I’m personally an active user of many non-custodial products. I’m a blockchain early-adopter, I like to hold my own money, and I’m very forgiving of suboptimal UX.
However, I’m not afraid to say the poop stinks. Decentralized applications simply cannot produce the type of product experience that mainstream consumers expect.
If the goal is growth and adoption, as a community I believe we’re barking up the wrong tree. We are trying to make fetch happen. It isn’t gonna happen. Our Netscape Moment is unlikely to arrive as long as we’re focused on decentralized applications. \"Mean Girls\" movie There’s a reason why the most popular consumer applications are centralized (Spotify, Amazon, Instagram, etc). There’s a reason why the most popular crypto applications are centralized (Coinbase, Binance, etc). The frameworks, tooling, infrastructure, and services to support these modern, centralized applications are mature and well-established. It’s easier to build apps that are fast & performant. It’s easier to launch apps that are convenient and on all form-factors (especially mobile). It’s easier to distribute and promote via all the major app store channels (iOS/Android). It’s easier to patch, update, and upgrade. It’s easier to experiment and iterate.
It’s easier to design, build, and launch a world-class application when it is centralized! It is why we’ve chosen this path for Genesis Block.
We have a lot more content coming. Be sure to follow our channels: https://genesisblock.com/follow/ Have you already downloaded the app? We're Genesis Block, a new digital bank that's powered by crypto & decentralized protocols. The app is live in the App Store (iOS & Android). Get the link to download at https://genesisblock.com/download
Interview With Eddie Jiang: How CoinEx Is Adapting To The Exchange Space And Growing
Written by chaintalk.tv https://preview.redd.it/v238540taz751.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2a852e171a74e49da802d7c12fadba452cf4cf43 We recently had the opportunity to interview the VP of ViaBTC Group, Eddie Jiang. ViaBTC Group owns popular crypto exchange CoinEx and ViaBTC Pool. In this interview Eddie discusses being the first exchange to use BCH as the base currency, ViaBTC Pool and integrating with CoinEx, new features and ambassador program, and competing with other exchanges like Binance and Huobi. Please enjoy the interview below. How come you decided to open up CoinEx to other cryptos other than just BCH? Eddie Jiang: CoinEx is the world’s first exchange to implement Bitcoin Cash as a base currency. At that time, it was evident that there was a demand for BCH trading markets, and we are the first to explore this opportunity. It also shows our determination to support the BCH’s development. As CoinEx is developing, our goal becomes bigger and we are aiming at the global market. We need to constantly improve our product diversification to meet the different needs of more users, so we open up to other cryptos. In the past six months, we have listed more than 50 new tokens. Up to now, we have listed 129 cryptos and 313 markets. Besides, in addition to spot trading, CoinEx also supports perpetual contract and other derivatives trading. How does CoinEx integrate with the ViaBTC Pool? Eddie Jiang: ViaBTC Group announced a strategic upgrade, which included a new organizational structure, product innovations and service improvements, on 30 May. As part of the change, the Group has established three dedicated business units (BU): the financial services BU, consisting of ViaBTC mining pool and CoinEx exchange; the infrastructure services BU, including ViaWallet and Blockchain Explorer; and the ecological development BU, focusing on the research and development of public chain technology and the construction of the ecology. After halving, the combination of mining and finance will become closer and closer. Investing in mining machines is like buying a Bitcoin option. Miners need more flexible financial products to maintain and increase the value of assets, or hedging services. Based on this judgment, the operations of ViaBTC mining pool and CoinEx exchange will be integrated in the future to realize the financial empowerment of the mining pool to meet the diverse financial needs of miners. Features of this integrated product upgrade can be summarized as: “ The mining pool is the wallet, and the wallet is the transaction.” ViaBTC is the world first mining pool that has a wallet embedded in the mining pool account. Users do not need to transfer the mined coins, and can realize the function of coin exchange within the wallet. For example, they can directly convert the mined coins into USDT to pay electricity bill. What’s more, users can store, deposit and withdraw their revenue, and transfer assets to CoinEx at any time without charge, as well as complete other operations on the exchange, such as purchasing wealth management products for asset preservation and appreciation. In addition, we also provide hedging services. All of the above functions can be completed in one stop in the mining pool, without the need to transfer assets between different platforms. The exchange empowers the mining pool, and the mining pool will further bring more traffic and resources to the exchange. The two complement each other and development coordinately. CoinEx has recently added many new features. Can you talk about what new updates were made to the platform and why you made them? Eddie Jiang: We have always attached great importance to the development of overseas markets since our establishment, and one of our major goals this year is to cover at least 10 different languages speaking markets. To realize this and to meet the needs of more users worldwide, CoinEx has been continuously optimizing and upgrading its operating strategies, products and services. Our product diversifications are constantly improving. As I said before, we have launched leverage trading, perpetual contract trading, and wealth management products in addition to just spot trading. However, we don’t ignore the importance of spot trading. More mainstream, popular, and high-quality tokens have been listed, and up to now, there are 129 tokens and 313 trading pairs on CoinEx. During the epidemic, we have never slowed down our development. Lacking of the OTC service has always been a shortage for CoinEx. In March, we partner with Simplex to integrate the first fiat onramp to our platform. People now can buy crypto with their credit cards, which lowers the threshold for more people to enter the crypto world. Moreover, we announced global strategic partnership with Matrixport to provide people with large amount of fiat to crypto needs the OTC service. These newly launched services also help to attract more users. At the same time, CoinEx has been launched in Arabic, Italian, English, Japanese, Russian, Korean and other 16 languages. Earlier we also carried out product upgrades, making the UI and function sections clearer. In terms of operations, we launched an upgraded CoinEx Ambassador program in March. To best utilize each ambassador’s personal strengths, there are four categories of CoinEx Ambassador with different responsibilities, namely Referral Ambassador, Marketing Ambassador, Operation Ambassador, and Business Ambassador, which will expand our brand’s exposure and help CoinEx grow into a more international exchange platform. From March until now CoinEx has seen a 100% increase in user registrations. Why is that and are you able to see where they are coming from? Eddie Jiang: Because of the efforts mentioned above, in 2020, we’ve seen an exponential increase in activity in just the past few months alone. In this year alone, CoinEx’s daily registered users increased by 100%. These new users mainly come from markets such as the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and more. Interestingly, we saw an uptick in traffic from the Middle East in March. User growth in Southeast Asia also picked up significantly, newly registered users increased by 133.6% in April. With Binance, BitMex, Huobi, Bybit, and Deribit, controlling most of the crypto futures and options markets, where do you see CoinEx fitting in? How do you plan to capture market share from these large exchanges? Eddie Jiang: We won’t compete with others. We focus on ourselves to improve products and our goal is to be better than yesterday. Our pace is solid and steady, instead of focusing on temporary heat and flow. We have always attached great importance of spot trading, and we are committed to be responsible for users’ investment. We have set up CoinEx Institution, which is dedicated on project research. A listing committee consist of core team members review and vote on projects recommended by the CoinEx Institution. In this way, fraud projects are avoided as much as possible. Besides, we will focus on niche areas with great potential. For example, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. CoinEx can serve users in those countries well by providing a platform with rich cryptos to trade, and will pay more efforts on refined operations in different countries. Moreover, CoinEx has a very complete ecosystem. Financial services, infrastructure, and ecological development, the three business units complement each other. The infrastructure BU is our cornerstone and is positioned as a defensive product; the financial service BU is a cash cow and is positioned as an aggressive product; the ecological development BU focuses on the public chain ecology and is the future infrastructure. What is the geographical breakdown of the CoinEx userbase? Eddie Jiang: The current proportion of CoinEx’s overseas users has reached 80% of the total registered users, and mainly in Australia, Southeast Asia, North America, Middle East and South Korea. Do you have plans to focus on any certain jurisdictions? How will you do that? Eddie Jiang: When we evaluate regions, two things matter: policy and potential. Whether an exchange’s business expansion in a region is smooth or not largely depends on the region’s policies. If the region is not very friendly towards cryptocurrency or has repeated attitudes, there will be more difficulties and the cost will be much higher. For a region’s development potential, we need to think about the demand and market development status. South Korea, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and other regions are all areas with good potential for cryptocurrency development. Compared with Europe and America, policy risks in these countries are lower, and the supervision mechanism is relatively complete. The public has a high degree of awareness of cryptocurrencies. Besides, some regions or countries have inflation problems due to political and economic reasons. CoinEx will continue to focus on the Middle East and South Asia, which are relatively niche. India has just lifted ban on cryptocurrency trading this year, and there are many cryptocurrency investors in Indian. CoinEx can serve them well by providing a platform with rich cryptos to trade. More people in the Middle East are interested cryptos, especially in countries that are subject to economic sanctions or high inflation. For those people, cryptocurrencies are one of the best choices for asset preservation. Since the CoinEx Ambassador program launched in March, it has been almost three months. We are conducting the second round of ambassador recruitment. This time, we will use the power of ambassadors to expand our recruitment coverage and strive to attract more crypto enthusiasts from all over the world to grow together with CoinEx. Moreover, we will launch the National Expansion plan and leverage on the CoinEx and ViaBTC mining pool resources, to further explore the Russian market. At the market level, we will make more PR efforts in local markets, and start refined operations. What is CoinEx Chain and CoinEx DEX? Eddie Jiang: CoinEx Chain is a public chain built on the Tendermint consensus protocol and the Cosmos SDK. It consists of three dedicated public chains parallel to each other. Among these three chains, CoinEx DEX meets the most basic needs of DeFi for token issuance, transfer, and transactions. The Smart Chain is designed to meet the needs of complex financial scenarios and delivers programmable cash. The Privacy Chain facilitates privacy and security. On November 11, 2019, we took the lead in launching the Mainnet of CoinEx DEX. CoinEx DEX is the world’s first public chain dedicated to decentralized transactions. Users can easily manage their digital assets on it. CoinEx DEX can fully satisfy the following conditions: users have private keys at their own disposal; transfers and transactions are all completed on-chain, which is 200% transparent and checkable; the issuance, transfer, and transaction of tokens do not require review or permission; the community governance and operation is decentralized, similar to EOS, and validators are introduced to the community ecosystem construction and governance. There are currently 41 validators. It also has extreme performance. TPS reaches as high as 10,000 and transactions are confirmed within seconds. The transaction fee, 0.0001 US dollars for each transaction, is negligible. Third, it’s simple and easy to use. The new operation interface design helps beginners get started quickly; with the one-click token issuing module, users only need to fill in a few items to issue tokens; the built-in automated market-making module guarantees liquidity. How will CoinEx DEX improve the decentralized exchange space that has been unable to gain much adoption? Eddie Jiang: There are many challenges and difficulties facing centralized exchanges. The first difficulty is security. Security is a huge concern for CEXs. Over the last 10 years, hackers have stolen more than $1.5 billion from centralized exchanges. In fact, research groups estimate that hackers stole somewhere between $950 Million and $1 Billion from centralized exchanges in 2018 alone. There were also incidents of coin thefts in other exchanges in 2019. Many exchanges, such as Mt. Gox, Youbit, were forced to file for bankruptcy and shut down as a result of hacks. The second is high management costs. Centralized exchanges need to list a large number of cryptocurrencies and each of them have different trading pairs. That entails huge efforts in development and maintenance and, thus, high management costs. The last is global policies. Cryptocurrency is faced with different regulatory policies in different countries. Every time a centralized exchange enters a country, it needs to adapt itself to local regulatory policies for compliance. This is a holdback for the exchange’s rapid market expansion globally. Such adaptation will also bring a huge learning cost for the exchange team. Obviously, these problems can be well solved by DEX. CoinEx DEX is a true DEX with full open source and full community governance, as well as without depending on official nodes, websites, wallets, etc. On DEX, users are able to in charge of their own private keys and assets all by themselves. Their assets are more safe and secure. Transfers and transactions are all completed on-chain, which is 200% transparent and checkable; and the issuance, transfer, and transaction of tokens do not require review or permission. What’s more, CoinEx DEX provides a great and convenient user experience. How will CoinEx Chain and DEX help the crypto industry as a whole? Eddie Jiang: The public chain is the cornerstone of the blockchain industry. CoinEx Chain has the parallelism of multiple dedicated public chains, each of which performs its own functions, by cross-chaining for both high performance and flexibility. CoinEx Chain is committed to building the next generation of blockchain financial infrastructure. It is a more complete ecosystem built around the DEX public chain. The DEX public chain is a dedicated public chain developed specifically for token issuance and trading and the biggest improvement on trading speed, so it only supports the necessary functions, not smart contracts. But smart contracts are the foundation for building more complex financial applications. Outside the DEX public chain, CoinEx Chain also includes a Smart Chain that supports smart contracts. Moreover, as privacy issues on the current blockchain have been criticized, it is one of the core tasks of CoinEx Chain to safeguard users’ privacy. Similar to the Smart Chain, the Privacy Chain specifically supports transaction privacy protection. With cross-chain circulation, it can improve the privacy characteristic of the entire CoinEx Chain ecosystem. Nowadays, 1.7 million people in the world have no bank accounts; however, among them, two thirds are smartphone users with huge demands for financial services. The public chain will empower DeFi applications’ development and popularization, not only help more companies to seize the huge market opportunity, but also to bring lasting transformations and improvements in people’s lives. With so many crypto exchanges, what is the future outlook of CoinEx when it comes to the crypto exchange space? Eddie Jiang: It has been nearly 3 years since CoinEx has been launched, but it’s quite young for an entrepreneurial team. We have seen too many projects’ failures due to governance issues. CoinEx has a very elite team with high technical and management capabilities. In terms of business, CoinEx has gradually developed with diversified business and a complete ecosystem. It’s clear that the market will still grow very fast in the future, and the market size is still very large. We will continue to improve our products, put more efforts in marketing and operations, as well as look for more high-quality projects, to increase the number of users and transactions on the platform. Lay a solid foundation, and I’m sure the time will come for us to shine. What updates is the CoinEx team most excited for? Eddie Jiang: We are very excited about the National Expansion Plan which will be launched later this year. It is an important part in CoinEx’s globalization strategy. We will actively explore some new markets while consolidate the original ones. CoinEx will set aside 10 million US dollars to set up a “Pioneer Fund” to support this plan. This fund will be used to support local cryptocurrency projects and promote the development of the local cryptocurrency communities through investment or cooperation. Our goal this year is to invest in projects and communities that are conducive to expanding the CoinEx ecosystem in countries with high development potential. Original article ClickHEREto register on CoinEx
Answer - As for Kava, Kava was originally founded in January 2018. It was formed by cofounders Scott Stuart, Ruaridh O’Donnell and myself with the mission to tackle the problem of interoperability. We started the company working with larger projects like Ripple, MakerDao, and Cosmos on their layer 2 and interoperability problems and developed a lot of expertise in this area. It wasn’t until 2019 that we eventually decided to put our expertise to public use and create the first interoperable DeFi blockchain, Kava.
Q2:
Could you please tell me what KAVA cryptocurrency is? What problem does it solve?
Answer - KAVA is the staking, governance, and reserve asset of the Kava DeFi platform. KAVA is required by node operators to secure transactions on the blockchain. Additionally, when lending fees are paid, they are converted to Kava and burned reducing the overall supply of KAVA tokens. As more users use the Kava lending platform, KAVA should become more scarce overtime.
Q3:
What is the advantage of keeping the KAVA token for a long and short term?
Answer - In the short term, if you stake KAVA you can earn additional block rewards every day, block by block. This provides a nice steady return on the Kava usually in the range of 3-20% depending on the number of people staking.
We will be opening the gates of DeFi to many top tier assets such as BNB, XRP, ATOM, and BTC which have never been able to use lending, stablecoins, or other DeFi Services. If you are a KAVA hodler you can benefit from owning and having a stake in the network as we grow because as the network grows, Kava is burned and it becomes more scarce as a resource.
Q4:
Chainlink is KAVA’s partner, can you explain more about this partnership?
Answer - Yes, this is not the usual chainlink partnership where a blockchain consumes data from Chainlink’s oracle solution.
No oracle solution adequate for DeFi applications on Cosmos was available. For this reason, Kava has teamed up with Chainlink to bring its data and reliable oracle solution to the Cosmos ecosystem. Chainlink nodes now will be able to securely publish data directly on the Kava blockchain where it can be used or easily transported to other Cosmos-based blockchains and applications. Chainlink oracles on Kava utilize all the industry-leading technologies of Chainlink, while enabling more frequent price updates and improving the reach and distribution of where that data can be used.
Since Kava’s blockchain is built using Tendermint, Tendermint-based blockchains within the Cosmos ecosystem (Binance, Terra, OKChain, Cosmos Hub, Agoric, Aragon, and others) will now be able to retrieve market data such as cryptocurrency, FX, and commodity prices. For DEX’s like Binance this will enable them to create futures, options, and other derivative products they were not able to do so before.
TLDR: Kava + Chainlink Data creates the ideal hub for all blockchains and applications to get their DeFi services and Data, and as result makes Kava a natural hub for the growing Cosmos ecosystem.
Q5:
What is the KAVA CDP product? Do you have any exciting things down the pipeline that you can share?
Answer - First, let me clarify that CDP simply means “collateralized-debt-position” similar to CDOs that exist in the traditional finance world. What it means is a loan using collateral to back the loan.
Kava’s lending platform offers collateralized loans to users who have crypto. Getting a loan with Kava’s platform is great if you don’t want to sell your crypto position, but need short term cash for payments or if you want to use the loan to get a levered / margin position without going through KYC.
As for news! Kava’s lending platform is scheduled to officially launch on the mainnet June 10th.
At this time, DeFi will be made available to BNB for the first time ever. Also at this time, the Kava DeFi platform will be awarding the first users that have BNB extremely high rewards for being early adopters.
Each week, 74,000 KAVA will be given out to all the users who have taken out loans on Kava. Yes, you get free KAVA, for taking out a loan using BNB!
Why should BNB users use KAVA’s lending platform and take out USDX? And how to mint USDX with BNB on KAVA CDP?
Answer - Free- maybe let's call it rewards for being good users 😉
The rewards are platform growth incentives so that we can grow the platform quickly.
Well at launch, definitely the KAVA rewards are a huge reason for BNB users to use it.
As for the product long-term, the major use case for our lending platform is to get a levered position without needing an exchange or to go through KYC.
How it works is that a BNB holder can deposit their BNB and take out USDX loans - this capital they will take and buy more BNB with it. Most people will use the loan this way to get 2-3x the original BNB amount. If the price goes up on BNB, they win 2-3x the gains!
Of course if the price goes down and they cannot repay their loan, the BNB collateral might get liquidated, so be careful, it works just like a margin trading account.
Q7:
Brian do you have any more information or links for our community about this?
KAVA was initially planned to launch on Ripple network but later switched to Cosmos Tendermint Core. [email protected] is that something you see in Tendermint Core that is not available anywhere?
Answer - For clarification, Kava was never planned to be on Ripple. However, Ripple is a Kava investor, shareholder, and partner.
We selected the Cosmos-SDK featuring the Tendermint BFT consensus because during our past work with Ripple, MakerDao, ETH, and other layer 2 work we learned the value of “finality” of blockchains. For example, on ETH, the finality of blocks do not happen right away. You need to reach 15+ blocks to be confirmed on Ethereum to really know a transaction has passed. This results in really slow user experiences that aren’t acceptable in finance or any application really.
Tendermint solves this because it makes every transaction final and occur in seconds.
Additionally, we chose the Cosmos-SDK as the framework to build our stand alone blockchain, Kava because it allowed us to create our own security model and design which enables Kava as a DeFi platform responsible for millions of dollars of collateral to be very secure in a way we could net get if we built it on any other network.
Q9:
KAVA does cross-chain support. Compared to other DeFi platforms, KAVA offer collateralized loans and stable coins to users too. How will volatility be managed there with so many different collateral systems in CDP?
Answer - Volatility is an important consideration and accurate and timely price reference data is needed to make sure the system works.
All the collateral positions rely on price feeds from oracles to determine if they are safe or need to be liquidated. Kava has created a novel partnership with Chainlink, where Chainlink oracles that normally run on Ethereum, operate nodes directly on Kava where they can post prices. This Kava to avoid network congestion, high gas fees, and other less desirable issues found on Ethereum, while enabling the oracles with Kava’s fast blocktimes and finality so they can actually deliver price updates 10-20x more frequently than is possible elsewhere. This makes Kava’s price feed data very reliable.
In times of volatility, if liquidations occur, the Kava platform automatically auctions collateral off for USDX on the market and burns the USDX. This mechanism keeps the system balanced and USDX algorithmically stable and always fully collateralized by real assets.
And it does this transparently, unlike the real world CDOs which caused the world issues in 2008 due to the lack of transparency in their assets and risk.
Q10:
Recently, Binance has released a white paper on BSC, a Binance smart chain. So, what can I get by staking through Binance Coin BNB?
Answer - Yay for smart contracts!
What can we get by staking bnb?
Staking BNB on Kava, or depositing it in a CDP and creating USDX from it earns users KAVA in rewards everyweek. A lot of rewards. In addition, you get USDX to hold which also pays out a savings rate each block that is much better than say what USD in a checking account could do.
Q11:
Various platforms are in Ethereum. So why is Kava not at Ethereum?
Answer - I could speak about this for ages, but there is a reason for Ethereum being the home to many hacks and bugs.
Kava is not on ethereum because we couldn’t build our system there. The main reasons. as I have mentioned are:
(1) Ethereum has congestion, oracle issues, high fees, and slow block times.
(2) Ethereum’s open smart contracting system can do anything. This is great for building crypto kitties, but horrible for financial software as it makes all code have infinite attack vectors that hackers can use which are impossible to test for. We built our own chain so we could scope the code and limit what attack vectors are possible.
(3) Building in solidity, the language of Ethereum, is horrible. The development environment is bad, testnets don’t work, and many other things are painful. Kava is primarily built in GO which is far superior for financial applications in most respects.
(4) The future is Cosmos. Binance, Okchain, terra, Cosmos Hub(ATOM), and Kava all are created using the Cosmos-SDK framework. I believe this is the future and the blockchain developers are moving to this in mass. Over 110 projects now are building with the Cosmos-SDK.
Q12:
What are ways by which Kava project generates profit/revenue to maintain project. What is your revenue model?
Answer - Kava is a for-profit financial DAO with over 80 different businesses staking Kava and voting on its evolution. They want to see Kava succeed so they vote to fund operations and developments that drive user growth in Kava. Due to fees paid in Kava and the burning mechanism, as the system grows in users, the Kava supply decreases making those that hold Kava win due to scarcity.
Q13:
Lending/Borrowing has been introduced by Binance. How can this affect the Kava since people can directly borrow BUSD from Binance with BNB used as collateral than going to Kava?
Answer - Kava will be featured on Binance as well. The main benefit of Kava is that there is no counterparty. The capital is minted on demand not sourced from somewhere. Binance and other centralized parties on the otherhand need to find capital to provide loans, creating a cost of capital. Kava is much more efficient at providing capital and avoids a lot of regulator issues.
I'll add I think BUSD in the future might be usable for collateral to Kava's loans as well. It would be cool 🙂
Q14:
What's your opinions on Future of DeFi & DApps? Do you think that DeFi is the future of current Financial world? Also, How do you see the future of KAVA?
Answer - I believe Centralized Finance and the existing infrastructure has a place. It has a lot of issues that cause things like the 2008 crisis and the current insolvency issues that are happening across the world due to trust-based debt with no actual backers other than the people which end up bailing out banks and other financial institutions that have made poor decisions.
DeFi's future is bright because it solves this fundamental issue. It removes trust and adds transparency. Kava is right at the foundation for all of DeFi as things grow and mature.
Q15:
Recently, we have seen some big hacks in DeFi platforms. How will KAVA deal with these bad actors of crypto and what security measures have been taken by KAVA for the safety of users' funds?"
Answer - Unlike a lot of DeFi startups, we take things seriously. We don't ""move fast and break things"" as Mark Zuckerberg would say.
We do a thorough analysis before suggesting to deploy code. Our internal team works very hard to run tests and simulations, once it passes internally, we give it to 3rd party auditors who try and game it and break the code. If it passes there, we give the code to the community to review and vote into the mainnet. In this way, I’d estimate about 100+ people review our code and test it before it goes live and consumers can touch it. I don't know many other project teams that due things with such diligence.
Q16:
Binance for KAVA is a very valuable partner in terms of increasing the number of users, but what is KAVA ready to give equivalent to Binance users? What applications will be integrated into Binance to expand the ecosystem?
Answer - Kava gives the BNB users loans. It gives the DEX a stablecoin and the ability to offer margin products. Kava’s connection to binance chain and chainlink data also enables Binance DEX to offer trustless derivatives like options and futures products going forward.
Q17:
Cosmos has limitations on working with PoW coins. How do you technically solve the problem of implementing DeFi products for bitcoin?
Answer - Cosmos is great for hard-to-work-with blockchains like BTC. It's flexible in how you can construct bridges. For example, the validator set can have a multisig private key split up into pieces in order to create a trustless escrow and control of assets on other blockchains. In this way, we can create peg zones with Cosmos for the best assets in the world. Once a zone is established, it can be used on Kava and other Cosmos chains.
Q18:
USDX is currently a little-known stable coin. Do you plan to add it to the top exchanges with good liquidity, including Binance?
Answer - USDX will be growing quickly. We have a plan to have it listed and get liquidity across several known exchanges shortly after launch.
Q19:
There are several options for using USDX on the KAVA platform, one of which is Margin Trading / Leverage. Is this a selection function or a compulsory function? Wondering since there are some investors who don`t like margin. What is the level of leverage and how does a CDP auction work?
Answer - Using Kava for Margin trading is 100% optional. You can choose how you want to use the margin loan. You don’t have to spend the USDX unless you want to. It could be used for everyday payments as well in the case you simply don’t want to sell your underlying collateral. If you don’t want the risk, do small loans with lots of collateral.
Q20:
Will your team have a plan to implement the DAO module on your platform, as it provides autonomy, decentralization and transparency?
Answer - DAO - Kava is a for-profit DAO and it’s fully functional already. We have on-chain governance and have underwent several votes and evolutions you can look at. You actually can see some current voting processes taking place here: https://kava.mintscan.io/proposals
We recently implemented a cool feature called committees, which enables the DAO to elect a small group of experts to make decisions without needing a vote of the whole user base. This enables the experts to have control over a small portion of the protocol - such as monitoring the debt limit, fees, etc and enables Kava to operate faster and be more adaptable in volatile market conditions.
Q21:
How can we address the possible overloads and security threats caused by increased users in the DeFi scene?
Answer - Yes, this is a huge issue for Ethereum, MakerDAO and everyone in the space. I don’t see a bright future for DeFi on Etheruem unfortunately. You can’t have a blockchain do everything well. Tether alone congests most of Ethereum and makes oracle price feeds lag the market. This can cause liquidations that should not happen and real people will lose real funds. It’s a huge issue.
The hope is for a dedicated system like Kava to provide a better backbone for DeFi applications going forward.
I should point out that Kava is not just a MakerDao for Cosmos or a CDP for Bitcoin. Kava is designed to be a foundational layer for DeFi services that every new blockchain and application will need.
Every blockchain will need DeFi services like lending, stablecoins, and data and they need it to be very secure. Kava does all this with its cross-chain lending plarform, USDX stablecoin, and Chainlink data in an incredibly secure, but accessible manner.
In this way, Kava aims to connect and serve all the major cryptocurrency communities and build it’s place at the center, where every developer can get what they need to build financial applications of the future."
Q22:
What distinguishes Kava from your existing competitors like Syntetix?
Answer - Synthetix isn't really a competitor, but it is an interesting project in terms of mechanism design. We share a lot of common investors and have similar token economic ideas with them. The only blockchain project that could be is MakerDAO, but they can only work with ETH assets due to their design. We are focused on the major cap assets - BTC, BNB, XRP, ATOM and others have a much larger market than ETH to address. BTC is 10x the size alone. Currently no one serves them with DeFi. We’re going after this opportunity and believe it to be a huge one.
Q23:
Why is the KAVA coin not used for Mint, why am I asking that because I see it can also make the value of KAVA coins grow naturally?
Answer - Why is Kava not used as a collateral? Well, it could be I suppose. The community might vote for this in the near future if they want us to be like synthetix. It makes the Kava token more valuable and it will incentivize much more locked-up Kava reducing overall circulating supply which is fairly favorable. The main reason we have not done this yet is that we(Kava and its community) are still weighing the risks of doing this given that Kava also functions as a reserve asset. I think it's likely Kava gets added as collateral at some point, but it will likely have a high debt-collateral ratio to address the issues similar to Synthetix which is 750%.
Q24:
How do you prevent in a manipulated KAVA Mint just to take advantage of a token prize when minting?
Answer - Minting rewards and manipulation. We’ve thought of this. Each week, the blockchain counts all the blocks, counts how many people had a loan in that period, then takes the average loan amount over time to calculate the rewards. If you open and close a loan - you will get very little rewards. You only get a large reward if you keep the loan open the full period.
Q25:
Who are your oracle providers? Are you also an oracle provider?
Answer - Kava may run 1 oracle in the future, but we will always have many and be the minority. Most chainlink oracle node operators are large players in the space that run staking infrastructure companies like cosmostation, chainlayer, chorus one, figment networks, etc. Binance will also be one of our oracles.
Q26:
If we look at all the different types of DeFi products _(decentralized exchanges, stablecoins, atomic swaps, insurance products, loan platforms, trade financing platforms, custody platforms, and crowdfunding platforms) currently covering important areas of traditional finance...where does Kava fit in?
Answer - To make any interesting financial product work you need capital, a stable store of value, and price data. These are really hard to get on current blockchain environments. Kava provides all of these.
Q27:
Many people describe Kava as similar to Maker (MKR). How is Kava different? Why do you think Kava has more potential?
Answer - MakerDAO is a smart contract with a singular purpose, to serve ETH. It sadly inherited the problems of ethereum. Kava is designed from the ground up for security and interoperability. We are targeting bigger and better assets and have more capabilities to serve them with what their developers and ecosystem need.
Q28:
What is the uniqueness of KAVA project that cannot be found in other project that´s been released so far ?
Answer - Well in June 10th, we will be the first ever blockchain project to bring DeFi to another blockchain in a real way. BNB users will have loans, stablecoins, and much more.
Q29:
The gas fee is an issue for blockchain besides scalability. Does your Kava provide a solution for gas?
Answer - gas fees are very low on Kava, only high enough to prevent spam. We dont need high fees for TX because validators are paid in block rewards. Additionally, we dont have competing transactions from crypto-kitties or other non-financial applications. This leaves all of Kava's throughput 100% dedicated to scaling financial transactions.
Q30:
Kava project works on DeFi (Decentralized Finance) But what’s the benefits of Decentralized Financial system? What are the possibilities of DeFi over Centralized Finance system?
Answer - Open access, no need for trust, and no censorship by singular governments or parties. Kava is accessible anywhere in the world, by anyone.
Q31:
Data supplied by oracles are false at times, how do you prevent this? How reliable are data received by KAVA?
Answer - This is why using premium / credentialed APIs is important for oracles. These data sources tend to be more accurate and better managed. Wrong prices can happen - for liquidation systems like Kava, we factor this into our design by using an average of data overtime form all oracles as part of the calculation.
Q32:
Can anyone become a KAVA validator, or is it just an invitation from the project itself? What are the requirements for becoming a KAVA verifier?
Answer - Anyone can become a validator, but you will need to stake or have enough stake delegated to you from others to be in the top 100 validators to earn block rewards.
Q33:
DEFI PULSE said that a total of 902M is currently locked. According to you, how will this number change in the next few years, and how will KAVA position itself as the top player in this market segment?
Answer - DeFi will only grow through 2020. And likely grow massively.
All projects on DeFi pulse are ""ethereum"" based. Kava is going to shake the blockchain world in the next few weeks by being the first ""multi-chain"" project on DeFi pulse and by my estimations we should quickly surpass a lot of the projects on that list.
Q34:
I am an testnet minter and the process seem Simplified, now I want to know if minting of USDX will continue when you launch Mainnet and do you have plans to build your own KAVA WALLET for easy minting on your mainnet
Answer - Simple blockchain experience?! high praise! Yes the process will be the same. Kava will not provide interfaces or wallets. Kava Labs builds software for the blockchain, our community members like Cosmostation, Frontier, Trust Wallet build support for people to interact with it.
Q35:
What business plans does Kava have with Seoul (South Korea) after partnering with Cosmostation? Do you plan to expand your products beyond Asia? Have you thought about harnessing the potential of South America?
Answer - South Korea is a perfect market for Kava's DeFi. Regulations prohibit fiat-backed stablecoins and margin trading. Kava's platform uses crypto-backed stabvlecoins and can enable users to get loans to margin trade. I am looking forward to further developing the Korean market for Kava, working with close partners like Cosmostation and showing the world real use cases of DeFi.
Q36:
Thank you for taking the time to conduct this AMA. Do you have any parting words, and where can the people go to keep up with all of the new happenings regarding Kava Labs?
Answer - Thanks for all the awesome questions! Amazingly thoughtful!
I've been promising the world cross-chain DeFi since June of last year. The IEO and mainnet went live Nov 2019. It's been a year of hard work - but an industry first is coming on June 10th. I'm excited. I hope you guys are.
Thanks for having me, I hope you become a USDX minter and get KAVA rewards. And last but not least, I love Binance - it's Kava's first home and I'm really happy to open up DeFi to BNB first.
Technical: A Brief History of Payment Channels: from Satoshi to Lightning Network
Who cares about political tweets from some random country's president when payment channels are a much more interesting and are actually capable of carrying value? So let's have a short history of various payment channel techs!
Generation 0: Satoshi's Broken nSequence Channels
Because Satoshi's Vision included payment channels, except his implementation sucked so hard we had to go fix it and added RBF as a by-product. Originally, the plan for nSequence was that mempools would replace any transaction spending certain inputs with another transaction spending the same inputs, but only if the nSequence field of the replacement was larger. Since 0xFFFFFFFF was the highest value that nSequence could get, this would mark a transaction as "final" and not replaceable on the mempool anymore. In fact, this "nSequence channel" I will describe is the reason why we have this weird rule about nLockTime and nSequence. nLockTime actually only works if nSequence is not 0xFFFFFFFF i.e. final. If nSequence is 0xFFFFFFFF then nLockTime is ignored, because this if the "final" version of the transaction. So what you'd do would be something like this:
You go to a bar and promise the bartender to pay by the time the bar closes. Because this is the Bitcoin universe, time is measured in blockheight, so the closing time of the bar is indicated as some future blockheight.
For your first drink, you'd make a transaction paying to the bartender for that drink, paying from some coins you have. The transaction has an nLockTime equal to the closing time of the bar, and a starting nSequence of 0. You hand over the transaction and the bartender hands you your drink.
For your succeeding drink, you'd remake the same transaction, adding the payment for that drink to the transaction output that goes to the bartender (so that output keeps getting larger, by the amount of payment), and having an nSequence that is one higher than the previous one.
Eventually you have to stop drinking. It comes down to one of two possibilities:
You drink until the bar closes. Since it is now the nLockTime indicated in the transaction, the bartender is able to broadcast the latest transaction and tells the bouncers to kick you out of the bar.
You wisely consider the state of your liver. So you re-sign the last transaction with a "final" nSequence of 0xFFFFFFFF i.e. the maximum possible value it can have. This allows the bartender to get his or her funds immediately (nLockTime is ignored if nSequence is 0xFFFFFFFF), so he or she tells the bouncers to let you out of the bar.
Now that of course is a payment channel. Individual payments (purchases of alcohol, so I guess buying coffee is not in scope for payment channels). Closing is done by creating a "final" transaction that is the sum of the individual payments. Sure there's no routing and channels are unidirectional and channels have a maximum lifetime but give Satoshi a break, he was also busy inventing Bitcoin at the time. Now if you noticed I called this kind of payment channel "broken". This is because the mempool rules are not consensus rules, and cannot be validated (nothing about the mempool can be validated onchain: I sigh every time somebody proposes "let's make block size dependent on mempool size", mempool state cannot be validated by onchain data). Fullnodes can't see all of the transactions you signed, and then validate that the final one with the maximum nSequence is the one that actually is used onchain. So you can do the below:
Become friends with Jihan Wu, because he owns >51% of the mining hashrate (he totally reorged Bitcoin to reverse the Binance hack right?).
Slip Jihan Wu some of the more interesting drinks you're ordering as an incentive to cooperate with you. So say you end up ordering 100 drinks, you split it with Jihan Wu and give him 50 of the drinks.
When the bar closes, Jihan Wu quickly calls his mining rig and tells them to mine the version of your transaction with nSequence 0. You know, that first one where you pay for only one drink.
Because fullnodes cannot validate nSequence, they'll accept even the nSequence=0 version and confirm it, immutably adding you paying for a single alcoholic drink to the blockchain.
The bartender, pissed at being cheated, takes out a shotgun from under the bar and shoots at you and Jihan Wu.
Jihan Wu uses his mystical chi powers (actually the combined exhaust from all of his mining rigs) to slow down the shotgun pellets, making them hit you as softly as petals drifting in the wind.
The bartender mutters some words, clothes ripping apart as he or she (hard to believe it could be a she but hey) turns into a bear, ready to maul you for cheating him or her of the payment for all the 100 drinks you ordered from him or her.
Steely-eyed, you stand in front of the bartender-turned-bear, daring him to touch you. You've watched Revenant, you know Leonardo di Caprio could survive a bear mauling, and if some posh actor can survive that, you know you can too. You make a pose. "Drunken troll logic attack!"
I think I got sidetracked here.
Lessons learned?
Bears are bad news.
You can't reasonably invoke "Satoshi's Vision" and simultaneously reject the Lightning Network because it's not onchain. Satoshi's Vision included a half-assed implementation of payment channels with nSequence, where the onchain transaction represented multiple logical payments, exactly what modern offchain techniques do (except modern offchain techniques actually work). nSequence (the field, but not its modern meaning) has been in Bitcoin since BitCoin For Windows Alpha 0.1.0. And its original intent was payment channels. You can't get nearer to Satoshi's Vision than being a field that Satoshi personally added to transactions on the very first public release of the BitCoin software, like srsly.
Miners can totally bypass mempool rules. In fact, the reason why nSequence has been repurposed to indicate "optional" replace-by-fee is because miners are already incentivized by the nSequence system to always follow replace-by-fee anyway. I mean, what do you think those drinks you passed to Jihan Wu are, other than the fee you pay him to mine a specific version of your transaction?
Satoshi made mistakes. The original design for nSequence is one of them. Today, we no longer use nSequence in this way. So diverging from Satoshi's original design is part and parcel of Bitcoin development, because over time, we learn new lessons that Satoshi never knew about. Satoshi was an important landmark in this technology. He will not be the last, or most important, that we will remember in the future: he will only be the first.
Spilman Channels
Incentive-compatible time-limited unidirectional channel; or, Satoshi's Vision, Fixed (if transaction malleability hadn't been a problem, that is). Now, we know the bartender will turn into a bear and maul you if you try to cheat the payment channel, and now that we've revealed you're good friends with Jihan Wu, the bartender will no longer accept a payment channel scheme that lets one you cooperate with a miner to cheat the bartender. Fortunately, Jeremy Spilman proposed a better way that would not let you cheat the bartender. First, you and the bartender perform this ritual:
You get some funds and create a transaction that pays to a 2-of-2 multisig between you and the bartender. You don't broadcast this yet: you just sign it and get its txid.
You create another transaction that spends the above transaction. This transaction (the "backoff") has an nLockTime equal to the closing time of the bar, plus one block. You sign it and give this backoff transaction (but not the above transaction) to the bartender.
The bartender signs the backoff and gives it back to you. It is now valid since it's spending a 2-of-2 of you and the bartender, and both of you have signed the backoff transaction.
Now you broadcast the first transaction onchain. You and the bartender wait for it to be deeply confirmed, then you can start ordering.
The above is probably vaguely familiar to LN users. It's the funding process of payment channels! The first transaction, the one that pays to a 2-of-2 multisig, is the funding transaction that backs the payment channel funds. So now you start ordering in this way:
For your first drink, you create a transaction spending the funding transaction output and sending the price of the drink to the bartender, with the rest returning to you.
You sign the transaction and pass it to the bartender, who serves your first drink.
For your succeeding drinks, you recreate the same transaction, adding the price of the new drink to the sum that goes to the bartender and reducing the money returned to you. You sign the transaction and give it to the bartender, who serves you your next drink.
At the end:
If the bar closing time is reached, the bartender signs the latest transaction, completing the needed 2-of-2 signatures and broadcasting this to the Bitcoin network. Since the backoff transaction is the closing time + 1, it can't get used at closing time.
If you decide you want to leave early because your liver is crying, you just tell the bartender to go ahead and close the channel (which the bartender can do at any time by just signing and broadcasting the latest transaction: the bartender won't do that because he or she is hoping you'll stay and drink more).
If you ended up just hanging around the bar and never ordering, then at closing time + 1 you broadcast the backoff transaction and get your funds back in full.
Now, even if you pass 50 drinks to Jihan Wu, you can't give him the first transaction (the one which pays for only one drink) and ask him to mine it: it's spending a 2-of-2 and the copy you have only contains your own signature. You need the bartender's signature to make it valid, but he or she sure as hell isn't going to cooperate in something that would lose him or her money, so a signature from the bartender validating old state where he or she gets paid less isn't going to happen. So, problem solved, right? Right? Okay, let's try it. So you get your funds, put them in a funding tx, get the backoff tx, confirm the funding tx... Once the funding transaction confirms deeply, the bartender laughs uproariously. He or she summons the bouncers, who surround you menacingly. "I'm refusing service to you," the bartender says. "Fine," you say. "I was leaving anyway;" You smirk. "I'll get back my money with the backoff transaction, and posting about your poor service on reddit so you get negative karma, so there!" "Not so fast," the bartender says. His or her voice chills your bones. It looks like your exploitation of the Satoshi nSequence payment channel is still fresh in his or her mind. "Look at the txid of the funding transaction that got confirmed." "What about it?" you ask nonchalantly, as you flip open your desktop computer and open a reputable blockchain explorer. What you see shocks you. "What the --- the txid is different! You--- you changed my signature?? But how? I put the only copy of my private key in a sealed envelope in a cast-iron box inside a safe buried in the Gobi desert protected by a clan of nomads who have dedicated their lives and their childrens' lives to keeping my private key safe in perpetuity!" "Didn't you know?" the bartender asks. "The components of the signature are just very large numbers. The sign of one of the signature components can be changed, from positive to negative, or negative to positive, and the signature will remain valid. Anyone can do that, even if they don't know the private key. But because Bitcoin includes the signatures in the transaction when it's generating the txid, this little change also changes the txid." He or she chuckles. "They say they'll fix it by separating the signatures from the transaction body. They're saying that these kinds of signature malleability won't affect transaction ids anymore after they do this, but I bet I can get my good friend Jihan Wu to delay this 'SepSig' plan for a good while yet. Friendly guy, this Jihan Wu, it turns out all I had to do was slip him 51 drinks and he was willing to mine a tx with the signature signs flipped." His or her grin widens. "I'm afraid your backoff transaction won't work anymore, since it spends a txid that is not existent and will never be confirmed. So here's the deal. You pay me 99% of the funds in the funding transaction, in exchange for me signing the transaction that spends with the txid that you see onchain. Refuse, and you lose 100% of the funds and every other HODLer, including me, benefits from the reduction in coin supply. Accept, and you get to keep 1%. I lose nothing if you refuse, so I won't care if you do, but consider the difference of getting zilch vs. getting 1% of your funds." His or her eyes glow. "GENUFLECT RIGHT NOW." Lesson learned?
Payback's a bitch.
Transaction malleability is a bitchier bitch. It's why we needed to fix the bug in SegWit. Sure, MtGox claimed they were attacked this way because someone kept messing with their transaction signatures and thus they lost track of where their funds went, but really, the bigger impetus for fixing transaction malleability was to support payment channels.
Yes, including the signatures in the hash that ultimately defines the txid was a mistake. Satoshi made a lot of those. So we're just reiterating the lesson "Satoshi was not an infinite being of infinite wisdom" here. Satoshi just gets a pass because of how awesome Bitcoin is.
CLTV-protected Spilman Channels
Using CLTV for the backoff branch. This variation is simply Spilman channels, but with the backoff transaction replaced with a backoff branch in the SCRIPT you pay to. It only became possible after OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (CLTV) was enabled in 2015. Now as we saw in the Spilman Channels discussion, transaction malleability means that any pre-signed offchain transaction can easily be invalidated by flipping the sign of the signature of the funding transaction while the funding transaction is not yet confirmed. This can be avoided by simply putting any special requirements into an explicit branch of the Bitcoin SCRIPT. Now, the backoff branch is supposed to create a maximum lifetime for the payment channel, and prior to the introduction of OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY this could only be done by having a pre-signed nLockTime transaction. With CLTV, however, we can now make the branches explicit in the SCRIPT that the funding transaction pays to. Instead of paying to a 2-of-2 in order to set up the funding transaction, you pay to a SCRIPT which is basically "2-of-2, OR this singlesig after a specified lock time". With this, there is no backoff transaction that is pre-signed and which refers to a specific txid. Instead, you can create the backoff transaction later, using whatever txid the funding transaction ends up being confirmed under. Since the funding transaction is immutable once confirmed, it is no longer possible to change the txid afterwards.
Todd Micropayment Networks
The old hub-spoke model (that isn't how LN today actually works). One of the more direct predecessors of the Lightning Network was the hub-spoke model discussed by Peter Todd. In this model, instead of payers directly having channels to payees, payers and payees connect to a central hub server. This allows any payer to pay any payee, using the same channel for every payee on the hub. Similarly, this allows any payee to receive from any payer, using the same channel. Remember from the above Spilman example? When you open a channel to the bartender, you have to wait around for the funding tx to confirm. This will take an hour at best. Now consider that you have to make channels for everyone you want to pay to. That's not very scalable. So the Todd hub-spoke model has a central "clearing house" that transport money from payers to payees. The "Moonbeam" project takes this model. Of course, this reveals to the hub who the payer and payee are, and thus the hub can potentially censor transactions. Generally, though, it was considered that a hub would more efficiently censor by just not maintaining a channel with the payer or payee that it wants to censor (since the money it owned in the channel would just be locked uselessly if the hub won't process payments to/from the censored user). In any case, the ability of the central hub to monitor payments means that it can surveill the payer and payee, and then sell this private transactional data to third parties. This loss of privacy would be intolerable today. Peter Todd also proposed that there might be multiple hubs that could transport funds to each other on behalf of their users, providing somewhat better privacy. Another point of note is that at the time such networks were proposed, only unidirectional (Spilman) channels were available. Thus, while one could be a payer, or payee, you would have to use separate channels for your income versus for your spending. Worse, if you wanted to transfer money from your income channel to your spending channel, you had to close both and reshuffle the money between them, both onchain activities.
Poon-Dryja Lightning Network
Bidirectional two-participant channels. The Poon-Dryja channel mechanism has two important properties:
Bidirectional.
No time limit.
Both the original Satoshi and the two Spilman variants are unidirectional: there is a payer and a payee, and if the payee wants to do a refund, or wants to pay for a different service or product the payer is providing, then they can't use the same unidirectional channel. The Poon-Dryjam mechanism allows channels, however, to be bidirectional instead: you are not a payer or a payee on the channel, you can receive or send at any time as long as both you and the channel counterparty are online. Further, unlike either of the Spilman variants, there is no time limit for the lifetime of a channel. Instead, you can keep the channel open for as long as you want. Both properties, together, form a very powerful scaling property that I believe most people have not appreciated. With unidirectional channels, as mentioned before, if you both earn and spend over the same network of payment channels, you would have separate channels for earning and spending. You would then need to perform onchain operations to "reverse" the directions of your channels periodically. Secondly, since Spilman channels have a fixed lifetime, even if you never used either channel, you would have to periodically "refresh" it by closing it and reopening. With bidirectional, indefinite-lifetime channels, you may instead open some channels when you first begin managing your own money, then close them only after your lawyers have executed your last will and testament on how the money in your channels get divided up to your heirs: that's just two onchain transactions in your entire lifetime. That is the potentially very powerful scaling property that bidirectional, indefinite-lifetime channels allow. I won't discuss the transaction structure needed for Poon-Dryja bidirectional channels --- it's complicated and you can easily get explanations with cute graphics elsewhere. There is a weakness of Poon-Dryja that people tend to gloss over (because it was fixed very well by RustyReddit):
You have to store all the revocation keys of a channel. This implies you are storing 1 revocation key for every channel update, so if you perform millions of updates over your entire lifetime, you'd be storing several megabytes of keys, for only a single channel. RustyReddit fixed this by requiring that the revocation keys be generated from a "Seed" revocation key, and every key is just the application of SHA256 on that key, repeatedly. For example, suppose I tell you that my first revocation key is SHA256(SHA256(seed)). You can store that in O(1) space. Then for the next revocation, I tell you SHA256(seed). From SHA256(key), you yourself can compute SHA256(SHA256(seed)) (i.e. the previous revocation key). So you can remember just the most recent revocation key, and from there you'd be able to compute every previous revocation key. When you start a channel, you perform SHA256 on your seed for several million times, then use the result as the first revocation key, removing one layer of SHA256 for every revocation key you need to generate. RustyReddit not only came up with this, but also suggested an efficient O(log n) storage structure, the shachain, so that you can quickly look up any revocation key in the past in case of a breach. People no longer really talk about this O(n) revocation storage problem anymore because it was solved very very well by this mechanism.
Another thing I want to emphasize is that while the Lightning Network paper and many of the earlier presentations developed from the old Peter Todd hub-and-spoke model, the modern Lightning Network takes the logical conclusion of removing a strict separation between "hubs" and "spokes". Any node on the Lightning Network can very well work as a hub for any other node. Thus, while you might operate as "mostly a payer", "mostly a forwarding node", "mostly a payee", you still end up being at least partially a forwarding node ("hub") on the network, at least part of the time. This greatly reduces the problems of privacy inherent in having only a few hub nodes: forwarding nodes cannot get significantly useful data from the payments passing through them, because the distance between the payer and the payee can be so large that it would be likely that the ultimate payer and the ultimate payee could be anyone on the Lightning Network. Lessons learned?
We can decentralize if we try hard enough!
"Hubs bad" can be made "hubs good" if everybody is a hub.
Smart people can solve problems. It's kinda why they're smart.
Future
After LN, there's also the Decker-Wattenhofer Duplex Micropayment Channels (DMC). This post is long enough as-is, LOL. But for now, it uses a novel "decrementing nSequence channel", using the new relative-timelock semantics of nSequence (not the broken one originally by Satoshi). It actually uses multiple such "decrementing nSequence" constructs, terminating in a pair of Spilman channels, one in both directions (thus "duplex"). Maybe I'll discuss it some other time. The realization that channel constructions could actually hold more channel constructions inside them (the way the Decker-Wattenhofer puts a pair of Spilman channels inside a series of "decrementing nSequence channels") lead to the further thought behind Burchert-Decker-Wattenhofer channel factories. Basically, you could host multiple two-participant channel constructs inside a larger multiparticipant "channel" construct (i.e. host multiple channels inside a factory). Further, we have the Decker-Russell-Osuntokun or "eltoo" construction. I'd argue that this is "nSequence done right". I'll write more about this later, because this post is long enough. Lessons learned?
Bitcoin offchain scaling is more powerful than you ever thought.
Wanchain Telegram AMA - 05/11/2019 - questions and answers
location: t.me/wanchainchat most of the questions and answers from AMA that happened on 05/11/2019 on Wanchain Telegram, sorry if I missed any!
question: The current roadmap of Wanchain ends in 55 days. (When) can we expect to see a new one? answer: Yes we have been in many discussions about our roadmap next year. Hopefule we will release that by the end of month. Please feel free to contribute...
question: What is the team doing more regarding marketing ? How much mcap wan is targeting? Competition is getting too much now.. answer: We are working with a few new marketing partners. Revamping social media, leveraging our ambassador program but giving an extra boost when the DEX with RiveX launches. As well as other dApps we are looking closely at and hoping to have them deployed quite soon.
question: Hello Mr. Lu. It seems integrating new existing blockchains to the wanchain ecosystem is a very slow process... indeed only 2 at the moment (ethereum and bitcoin)... one every 9 months... when is this time going to be reduced and by how much time... ? there are hundreds of blockchains out there... both public and private... I understand the success of wanchain depends on integrating as many blockchains as possible. answer: We are in the process of improving the cross-chain mechanism and make it more open. Once that is done, they will be coming a lot faster. BTW, we are working on EOS integration...
question: Hello. What are your next major plans to boost wanchain ecosystem? Who is going to use wanchain network? Any significant partnerships? answer: We are working with FinNexus and RiveX currently to build the ecosystem. Also we are working with our partner on the cross-chain DEX
question: Does wanchain work for interop with chain like hyperledger and such? answer: Yes we are working with EEA and Hyperledger on the interoperability standards
question: Do feel financially stable? Do you still have funds from ICO to continue as going concern? answer: Yes, we have enough funds to continue our develoment in the coming years
question: My second question is related to the Elevenpaths (Telefonica) / Rivetz / Civic / Wanchain partnership. Is it still alive? Could you please share any details about the progress of that partnership up to date? answer: Hey, I'll take that one. We have a few new things in motion with Telefonica's Eleven Paths. Due to NDA we cannot comment on the specifications but more is definitely coming :)
question: We have seen many stable coins added to Wanchain (DAI, GUSD, TUSD, USDC). But I miss Tether... Are there plans to include USDT in Wanchain? It would be really helpful for WRDEX success IMHO answer: We'd love to integrate with USDT. It will only takes us a few days to integrate with the USDT on Ethereum...A little more challenging for the one on BTC though
question: Next Question : will there be any AMA in binance group for more new users engagement for the WAN ? so many great projects are doing ama in exchange group, team should consider some AMA with current listed exchanges.. answer: That's a great idea and yes we are planning to have more AMAs in/with other communities. After all, we are bridging technically (blockchains) but also their communities. We had a good AMA in the Cryptoverse telegram last week. We also intend to include more team members in future AMAs (business, technical, community, marketing).
question: i was wondering if its possible to increase the number of validators selected and reduce the amount of reward per selection? Small nodes will get selected more frequently, so people wont just choose large nodes for delegation answer: That is possible by reducing the block time. We have many parameters to play around but all of them require code change. At the stage we want to gather enough data from the POS network before we make any changes...
question: Hi Jack, which month do you expect storemannodes to be implemented? If all goes according to plan. answer: We are doing internal planning right now. Hopefully you can see our roadmap very soon...
question: What work doing our team to increase use cases of wan? answer: We are researching Dapps on different chain and are focusing on cross-chain DEFI applications. That's why we are working with FinNexus and RiveX. Also DEX, Lending applications, Games are coming up...
question: What's your take on mass adoption of wanchain? Do you have any plan or strategy to achieve that?answer: It will be a long process but will be faster than internet mass adoption. We are working with mobile partners like Telefonica and Pundix get us well positioned. Also we are looking into DEXes, DEFI applications, integration with Libra and DCEP and etc.
question: Hi @jackxlu, what will be the boost of WAN in 2020 to build confidence, create awareness and more adoption? Also why work on a cross-chain DEX when you can also work together with a cross-chain DEX, for example Switcheo/Neon Exchange? answer: Each partner has their own technologies and their own priority. We just want to push that forward as soon as we can
question: Hi @jackxlu what is the status of the blockchain interoperability alliance with aion and icon? It’s been a while since there has been any news on that. I know that the focus has been for each project to get their mainnet built and properly functioning. Since all 3 now have working Main nets and projects starting to deploy, will you be working more closely with those other projects again in terms of interoperability? answer: Hey Tim! There is no update here. Projects are focused on their own roadmaps for now and as Jack mentioned above, each project has its own technology so there isn't much need for the interoperability alliance right now. We will, however, bridge all chains together it's just a question of when. We hope to collaborate more with Aion and Icon going forward but we have to continue working on new integrations and eventually come out with a plug and play solution.
question: Is tokenization of building and other real world stuff in wan program? answer: On the enterprise side, we are mostly focused on interoperable reward programs (like with Telefonica's Eleven Paths, PUC Malaysia) as its a blue ocean right now. We are however talking to a few of our partners about creating joint ventures (tech + business) in Asia and Europe. We will leverage each other's technology stacks and business contacts.
question: You only mentioned WAN POS TPS is more than 1000+. Can you showcase the TPS to the community ? Or is there any already we can see it ? answer: Our research team has been working on gathering and analyzing POS data in the past few weeks. We should have the research data published very soon
question: Is it possible to integration with DCEP? I doubt China will allow an altcoin do that, please confirm it. answer: It's too early to tell but we do want to get the right partnership and make that a reality
question:@jackxlu how about SDK for popular programming languages like c# and java? For smart contract development you will only support solidity programming language? I understand the initial choice of this, take advantage of the network effect of developers that already know solidity, but what about all the others? answer: We recently released a SDK for Java. As long there is a demand, we can easily do for any programming language. For smart contract, we are looking into EWASM and hopefully we can support many programming languages for the smart contract
question: Can you share something about the legal status of Wanchain in the US, are there any legal issues/obstacles for getting listed on a US regulated exchange in the future? answer: No legal reasons stopping us from getting listed in the US. We want WAN to be available to anyone that wishes to use our platform. Having said that, there are a number of discussions happening and we are taking necessary precautions to stay ahead, it's just taking very long. That's all we can say about that right now, Adam.
question:@jackxlu can you talk about the recent events in China and their impact on Wanchain? what is wanchain doing to take advantage of china opening up to blockchain? answer: The recent events in China are very exciting. Many people approached me for possible partnership. Our team in China is so busy in different talks in recent days. Wanchain 4.0 release is coming up by the end of year and we have been working with EEA and Hyperledger on the interoperability standards. We have Lanchain as our enterprise solution and Wanchain can integrate with any other types of enterprise blockchain solutions. So we are really well positioned to take advantage of the current blockchain boom in China in the coming years
question: Any concrete plan on embark more developers to wanchain ecosystem? Team alone won't make it in the long run. answer: We plan to build https://wandevs.org/ out further. Wandevs is a community of developers working on technical documentation, cross-chain dApps and tools for Wanchain. We had a soft launch but plan to increase the number of developers and incentives in this program through new guides, challenges and vitual hackathons. We are for example talking to 0xcert now about doing a cross-chain NFT virtual hackathon in the new year.
question: Hi Jack Lu. Amazing to have you here! You perhaps have already answered this question, but will the others blockchain projects ever be able to integrate themselves to Wanchain (plug & play system)? Waiting for wanchain team to do the whole work can be hard. answer: Our plan is to get the solution perfect before our dev community or other projects can integrate with Wanchain by themselves
question: Hi @jackxlu, @machinayz has there been any progress with the potential Belt and Road initiative contract that you spoke of in a previous AMA? Thanks. answer: Sorry Steve, we missed this. There are no further updates here. Li Ni and team are working hard on it though :)
question: Jack Lu, thanks for your work. Wanchain is growing a lot. My question: Are you talking with any retail company for partnership? answer: Not yet but it's a great idea because Wanchain can serve as a gateway for multi-coin payment. Any suggestions?
question:@jackxlu Is there any plan to improve node management ? to pass "partner off-chain" to "partner on-chain"? answer: Not at this point but please send your requirement or suggests to me. Thanks!
question: Do you still believe in Wanchain becoming a top 10 project? Thank you both Oliver and Jack for your time and answers¡ It has been a great AMA. answer: Sure I do believe that. And thanks so much for your support!
Thanks for everyone for participating, sorry if I missed any questions/answers. Stay tuned for any upcoming AMAs!
Buying Ether in Canada, my experience with different exchanges
Hello, I'm writing about my experiences buying ethereum in Canada, essentially converting CAD to ETH. The goal is to help beginners that are interested in getting started but don't know where to actually buy ether. There's a lot of info out there but most of it seems to be centered around USD, which doesn't always translate for CAD and our banking system. I'm by no means an expert but I figured someone might find this information helpful. I've verified and used the following sites, so I'll be writing about them:
If you just want the gist of it, a super-quick summary of what I found:
Coinbase: great if you just want to try things out. Fast to get ether, fast to verify, high fees.
QuadrigaCX: great if you're looking to get more seriously into cryptocurrency. Most deposit options, lower fees.
Kraken: great if you have a ton of money you want to transfer into cryptocurrency or if you want to play around with trading. Low fees, slow CAD deposit because wire transfer.
Coinsquare: Fees aren't bad, low volume though.
With every one of these sites, there's usually some form of verification. This involves taking a picture of some piece of government ID (usually passport or drivers license), as well as some sort of proof of address such as a utlity bill. Some sites require you to take a selfie with some of that documentation or holding a handwritten sign. It seemed sketchy to me at first, but every place does it. Coinbase This was the first place I tried. Their only payment methods I could find are Visa and MasterCard, of which they charge a 3.75% convenience. With reward cards you might get 1%-2% back, but this is a fairly high fee. The bright side is it's just about instantaneous. One thing I noticed is that their sell price is about ~$5 higher than a few exchanges. For example, as I write this, it's $119.23 on coinbase. On kraken it's 113.99 for a market order. There is a weekly $200 limit on the amount to buy. A 30 day countdown started after I spent $500 to increase the limit. I can't find what the new limit amount will be once that countdown reaches 0 though. So far, I've been with them for over a month and I've bought $600 worth of ether. The first time I bought it only took a minute to get sent to my private address. The second time it took ~40 minutes for it to actually get sent to my private ether address, but this was due to some issues they were having, probably just a fluke. I've bought two more times since then and both times it was instant. To summarize Pros:
Fast to verify, took a couple minutes, seemed to be completely automated
Almost instantly sent funds via Visa/Mastercard
Instantly got the ether I bought
Probably the easiest to use
Cons:
Generally $5 over Kraken prices
High fees at 3.75%. Might be able to brought lower with a good rewards card
Low $200 weekly limit
QuadrigaCX Hoping to get lower fees, this was the second place I tried. They accept a lot more payments with a variety of fees, I'll list them out:
Funding Type
Daily Limits
Time Frame
Fee
Verification
Electronic Funds Transfer
Min $250, Max $10,000
5 Business Days
5%
required
Interac e-Transfer
Min $500, Max $5,000
Next Business Day
2% + $5
required
Interac Online
Min $50, Max $2,000
Instant (but may be held 24 hours by security)
1.5% (min. $5)
required
Bank Wire
Min $100,000, Max $500,000
2-4 Business Days
Free
required
Crypto Capital
Min $500, Max $500,000
24 hours
Free
required
Electronic Funds Transfer replaced their "direct bank transfer" option, and while I think it's great since I think every bank supports it, it unfortunately has a rather high fee at 5%. I don't really see why you would use this though, if you can use Interac Online, it's faster. If you need the higher daily limit, a bank wire would be cheaper too. Interac e-Transfer I'd go with this if your bank doesn't support Interac Online and if you don't mind the 2% fee. If you're doing a large amount, the Bank Wire would be a better choice, depending on how much your bank charges you. Interac Online seems like the best choice for less than $2000. Unfortunately even though my bank card says "Interac" on it, and the bank is listed as supported, I can't use it for Interac Online because the card is both a debit and visa card. I've read that RBC and BMO are the only banks that support this, so it may be worth signing up with them. Bank Wire ended up being what I used (EDIT: back then the minimum for a wire transfer was $500). I wanted to deposit a larger sum, so just paying my bank for the cost of the transfer ended up being worthwhile (about 0.5% fee). The downside is I had to go in person to a branch to send a wire transfer and it's only really worthwhile for larger transfers. Crypto Capital seems like a 3rd party that you can wire to and then transfer that to QuadrigaCX. I don't see the appeal in using this to fund an account since you can just wire to QuadrigaCX directly. I sent the wire transfer a few days ago, and it seems like it will take 3-5 business days for it to complete. I'll update this post if the money somehow just disappears. Wire transfer came through today, no problems :) Once you do get CAD on QuadrigaCX, the fees to buy Ether are 0.5%. Combined with my wire transfer cost, I expect to only have paid a total of 1% in fees. To summarize Pros:
Fast to verify, I was able to verify the same day I made my account
Lots of variety in funding choices
Lower fees compared to coinbase
High daily fund limits
Cons:
Not as many deposit options if they don't support your bank
0.5% per completed trade is a little high compared to other exchanges
Some transfer options have higher fees than coinbase for low amounts
Some transfer options can take up to 5 days
Kraken The latest site I've tried, they have multiple tiers of verification. You can't deposit CAD until you reach tier 3 verification, which can take up to 48 hours. Tier 1 and tier 2 were verified within the hour but tier 3 was still not verified 3 days later. When I submitted a support ticket, they were very quick to respond the next day and told me I needed to submit a Confirmation ID. Their site listed the Confirmation ID for a few countries and some criteria but it didn't seem like Canada applied to any of the criteria. Regardless, I submitted the Confirmation ID and was verified with tier 3 that same day. The only way to deposit CAD with Kraken is through wire transfer and it seems like there's some unlisted fees based on what their banks charge them to receive a wire transfer (as well as any intermediary bank). I have not done this so I cannot tell what the costs would be. Once you do have CAD on their exchange, their fees are better than QuadrigaCX with a MakeTaker rate at 0.16%/0.26%. I have sent ether to Kraken just for playing around with trading and I've had no problems. To summarize Pros:
Low trading fees
Potentially lower CAD->ETH fee than QuadrigaCX, depending on if there are wire transfer hidden costs. Lower trading fee helps
High fund limits
Cons:
Only one way to deposit CAD and it's slow
Unclear what the wire transfer costs are
Little confusing verification process for tier3
Coinsquare Verified today and decided to try the Interac e-transfer. This is when I encountered a problem (at least on firefox), for funding the account, they have a javascript button to dismiss an overlay before you can do the e-transfer. The html element for the button is an href and has a 'blank="target"' property on it. When I press this button, it opens a blank new tab, and nothing changes on the page. Running the javascript function manually causes the alert to be removed and it works as expected. This is a little insane that I had to have knowledge of html to get access to it. Their site has been improved a significant amount and I haven't ran into these kinds of problems since. Anyway the e-transfer itself worked perfectly, it funded my account, and I think it's my favourite way to transfer CAD into exchanges so far. Only a 2.5% fee and only takes a few minutes to be in my account. They also have wire transfer, money order, and bank order, but I think other exchanges have a much better interface. Buying Ethereum was a bit more confusing since (as far as I can tell) you can't trade CAD to ETH directly, you have to trade CAD for BTC first, and then trade that BTC for ETH. The interface for placing an order was confusing to me compared to Kraken or QuadrigaCX, but I figured it out. Although I was interested in seeing how many orders there were and for how much, but I wasn't able to find that. Buying BTC has a trade fee of 0.1%, and then trading for ETH has a trade fee of 0.2%. Overall total fees for e-transfer were ~1.3%~ 2.8% now, which is great considering what other fees are and how fast it is in comparison. If you can get past the interface, e-transfer is the way to go.
Funding Type
Daily Limits
Time Frame
Fee
Verification
Interac Online
Min $100, Max $2,000
Instant (withheld for 3 days)
2.5%
not required
Intac e-Transfer
Min $100, Max $3,000
1-3 days (withheld 0-7 days)
5%
required
Flexepin
Min $20, Max $500
instant
2.5%
required
Bank draft
Min $1000, Max $9,000
0-2 days (withheld 0-5 days)
0.25%
required
Money Order
Min $100, Max $1,000
0-2 days (withheld 0-5 days)
0.25%
required
Wire transfer
Min $10,000, Max $300,000
0-1 day (withheld 0-2 days)
0.5%
required
They have this concept of withholding funds, where you basically have to keep the money on the account. You can trade with it as much as you want, but you won't be able to withdraw until after the withholding time. Pros:
Lowish trading fees
Some options are fast to fund
Reasonable fund limits
Cons:
The direct way to go from CAD->ETH has higher trading fees. Have to go CAD->BTC and then BTC->ETH.
Horrible interface. Until they fix their site, some stuff is broken (unless it works in other browsers?), or if you know how to edit html. Wow! They really fixed their site and it looks great now! Only thing that bothers me is in the advanced section, it lists the CAD/BTC price in terms of bitcoin. So instead of saying $3400/bitcoin, it says 0.00029378BTC
Fairly high withdraw fees (unfortunately I can't find them listed on their site, and I can't find it listed anywhere, but some people have reported it being far too high)
Alternatives There are of course other sites to get ether, and there's always the option of getting bitcoin and exchanging it through an exchange like Kraken or Poloniex for ether. There are bitcoin ATMs scattered around as well, but I can't comment on any fees involved or how close they match exchange prices. Other sites I checked out:
Local Bitcoins - It looks like I'd have to find another user to trade with and prices seem far higher than the exchanges.
Poloniex - Doesn't look like you can deposit CAD.
Gemini - Don't see a way to deposit CAD. Also sent verification 2 days ago and have not been verified.
Bitfinex - Can't wire transfer USD out at this moment and I don't see a way to deposit CAD.
Coinswitch - Can't deposit CAD.
GDAX - Can't deposit CAD.
CEX.IO - Price quotes are signficantly higher than other exchanges, and it looks like it only does USD. Right now, their site says you can buy 1 ETH as $289.25 USD, compare that to GDAX which has them trading at $259.98 USD. You can sell on it too, but again, the price isn't favorable, sell on it for $250 USD vs selling on GDAX for $260 USD.
QuickBT - Only small amounts of ETH, and fees seem to range between 5-9% depending on how much you buy. Only supports interac online and flexepin.
Alt Coins The main sites for getting CAD into the cryptocurrency space like QuadrigaCX, Coinbase, Kraken, and Coinsquare don't have a lot of altcoins. Fortunately once you have ether you can send it to another exchange and trade that for altcoins. These are my favourite ones:
Bittrex - You can't buy ETH with CAD directly, but it has a lot of other cryptocurrencies. I used this until Binance came out. They closed accounts for people unverified or from some countries, so I'd be wary about using it.
Binance - You also can't buy ETH with CAD directly on this one, but it's my favourite for getting into other cryptocurrency coins. Fees are also lower than bittrex if you hold their BNB coin and they add new coins much faster. Referral | Non-Referral
Kucoin - Registration on Binance/Bittrex has been up and down lately and I've had success using this exchange. They seem to add coins even faster than Binance, but the site is a little bit slower and less polished. Still functional and good to pickup a few alts that you can't get elsewhere. Referral | Non-referral
Funnily enough, this whole experience has made me appreciate the flexibility cryptocurrency like ether has and served as a reminder to how slow and cumbersome transactions become once the banking system is involved. EDIT: received wire transfer through QuadrigaCX, made account with coinsquare. EDIT2: added coinsquare section EDIT3: updated QuadrigaCX and coinsquare section, updated alternatives list EDIT4: Added e-transfer for QuadrigaCX! EDIT5: Cleaned up alt coins section.
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